Plenary Speakers

Talk title: Seeing Atomic-Level Structural Dynamics in Materials: Managing Temporal Resolution and Electron Dose Rates

Peter A. Crozier is a Professor of Materials in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy at Arizona State University. He has extensive experience in characterizing ceramics, metal nanoparticles and catalytic materials for applications related to energy and the environment. He has expertize in developing and applying advanced techniques of transmission electron microscopy, including in situ and operando methods to problems in ion conductors and catalytic materials. He is also applying electron energy-loss spectroscopy to determine the optical and vibrational properties of nanomaterials. Over the last 5 years, he has explored the effectiveness of various deep learning models for removing noise in electron images, spectra and diffraction patterns. He is a Fellow of the Microscopy Society of America and also a member of the Materials Research Society, the North American Catalysis Society and the American Ceramics Society. He served as the President of the Microscopy Society of America. He has organized numerous workshops, schools and symposia and has published 200 archival journal papers and book articles.

Talk title: Novel tools for studying organelle dynamics in health and disease

Dr. Uri Manor is the Faculty Director of the Goeddel Family Technology Sandbox and Assistant Professor of Cell & Developmental biology at the University of California, San Diego School of Biological Sciences. The Manor Lab develops new methods and tools for studying cellular dynamics with nanometer precision (a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick). This includes artificial-intelligence-based computational approaches (deep learning) that integrate data from microscopes to increase image resolution, sensitivity, and collection speed beyond what’s possible with any other existing method. The Manor Lab also develops new imaging, genetic, and molecular tools that facilitate the monitoring and manipulation of cellular structures implicated in diseases including neurodegenerative diseases and hearing loss. Using these advanced technologies, the Manor Lab connects structure to function. Their research advances scientists’ understanding of these cellular processes and ultimately helps discover and create new therapies for treating these conditions.

Talk title: Microscopy of Mesoporous Nitrides

Prof Rachel Oliver FReng is a materials engineer, inventor and spinout founder, and Director of the Cambridge Centre for Gallium Nitride.  Her passion for understanding and engineering the small-scale structure of semiconductor materials to enable new technologies has been recognised in 2021 by her selection as an IEEE Photonics Society Distinguished Lecturer and in 2023 by the award of a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies.  Rachel is an advocate for equality, diversity and inclusion in science and engineering, and has addressed the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee on these issues. She is also engaged with policy-making as a member of the Advisory Board to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Semiconductors.

Talk title: Navigating academia’s hidden curriculum

Dr Jess Wade is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Lecturer in Functional Materials in the Department of Materials at Imperial College London. Her research considers new materials for optoelectronic devices and quantum technologies, with a focus on chiral systems and the identification of strategies to control photon and electron spin. Outside of the lab, Jess is involved with several science communication and outreach initiatives. She is committed to improving diversity in science, both online and offline.

Talk title: Extracting the invisible from live cell microscopy

Assaf Zaritsky is an Associate Professor in the Department of Software and Systems Information Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel. He performed his graduate training in computer science at Tel Aviv University, and postdoctoral training at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and joined BGU in October 2018. His research is in computational cell biology, at the interface of data science and cell biology. Motivated by fundamental questions in cell biology, his lab produces biological insights along with specialized analytic tools that reveal hidden patterns in dynamic and high-dimensional cell imaging data. The main research themes in the lab are multicellular information processing and interpretable AI in cell imaging. Research projects are interdisciplinary and involve close cooperation with experimental cell biologists.