Plenary Speakers

Talk Title: 40 Years of Atomic Force Microscopy 
09:05 - 09:50, Tuesday 6 July 2027

Franz J. Giessibl holds the Chair for Quantum Nanoscience at the University of Regensburg, Germany, and is a Research Professor at Kanazawa University, Japan. A pioneer of atomic force microscopy (AFM), he began his career in 1988 as the PhD student of Nobel Laureate Gerd Binnig at the IBM Physics Group Munich, LMU. There, together with Binnig and Christoph Gerber, he built the first AFM for low-temperature, ultrahigh-vacuum (UHV) operation and achieved true atomic resolution on an ionic crystal. He then joined an AFM manufacturer in Silicon Valley, where he designed and built a UHV AFM and launched the field of atomically resolved noncontact AFM by being the first to achieve true atomic resolution on the 7×7 reconstruction of silicon.

In 1995, while working as a management consultant at McKinsey, he invented the qPlus sensor — a novel core for the AFM — in his home laboratory on weekends. He joined the University of Augsburg in 1997, where he completed his habilitation in 2001. An extended version of his habilitation thesis, published in Reviews of Modern Physics in 2003, has since been cited more than 3,500 times and is widely regarded as one of the foundational review papers in AFM.

In 2005 he received offers for chairs at the University of Bristol and the University of Regensburg, joining the latter in 2006. Since then he has led key AFM experiments in atomic manipulation, subatomic spatial resolution, artificial atoms, topological insulators, and others, often in collaboration with the IBM laboratories in Almaden and Zurich, NIST in Gaithersburg, the National University of Singapore, Kanazawa University, and others. His qPlus sensor is now the standard for low-temperature AFM, used by seven international AFM manufacturers in more than 500 instruments worldwide; in 2026 the AFM market leader launched an instrument using the qPlus sensor under ambient conditions.

Franz J. Giessibl is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Salzburg, the European Academy of Sciences in Brussels, and the Japanese Vacuum- and Surface Science Society, and a Distinguished Fellow of the International Engineering and Technology Institute. His awards include the Feynman Prize on Nanoscience, the Heinrich Rohrer Grand Medal, the NIMS Award, the APS Keithley Prize, and the MRS Innovation in Materials Characterization Award.

He has also collaborated with the eminent visual artist Gerhard Richter, as documented in his 2022 book “First View Inside an Atom. Encounters with Gerhard Richter between Art and Science.” His new book, “Atomic Force Microscopy and Atomic Manipulation. An Inquiry into Matter,” will appear with Springer Nature in 2026.

Talk Title: Imaging Meiosis: How Eggs Make Chromosome Errors and How These Errors Can Be Prevented
09:00 - 09:45, Wednesday 7 July 2027

Melina Schuh is a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences (formerly Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry) in Göttingen, Germany, where she leads the Department of Meiosis.

She graduated in Biochemistry from the University of Bayreuth in 2004, working on centromeres in Drosophila embryos with Stefan Heidmann and Christian F. Lehner. In 2008, she obtained her PhD from the University of Heidelberg and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), where she established methods for high resolution microscopy of live mouse oocytes in the group of Jan Ellenberg. In 2009, she became a Group Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB). At the LMB, her group carried out the first studies of meiosis in live human oocytes and developed strategies for high content screens for meiotic genes in mammals. In 2016, she was appointed to her current position at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (since 2022 Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences). Her laboratory studies how errors arise during the meiotic divisions of mammalian eggs, and what causes the age-related decline in female fertility. Her lab also developed a new method for the acute degradation of endogenous proteins, called Trim-Away. Melina Schuh is a member of the Leopoldina (German National Academy of Sciences), an EMBO member and a recipient of the Leibniz Prize, the EMBO Gold Medal, the Colworth Medal, an ERC Starting Grant, the Biochemical Society Early Career Award (Cells), the European Young Investigator Award, the Lister Research Prize, the John Kendrew Young Scientist Award, and the Binder Innovation Prize.

Talk Title: More Than an Interpreter: Rethinking Deaf Inclusion in Healthcare, Research and Academia
18:15 - 19:00, Wednesday 7 July 2027

Dr Claire Goodchild is Scientific Operations Manager at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre, University of Cambridge, where she supports the strategic development and delivery of interdisciplinary cancer research across the Cambridge cancer ecosystem.

Alongside her scientific operations role, Claire has a strong interest in addressing inequalities in cancer research, healthcare and academia. She has worked closely with the Deaf community and partner organisations to improve the accessibility of cancer information and research engagement for British Sign Language (BSL) users. This has included Deaf-led public engagement, BSL training and awareness initiatives, accessible cancer communications, and the co-development of new BSL signs for cancer terminology through the Beyond Words project.

Her work focuses on moving beyond accessibility as an afterthought, working in partnership with communities to identify and remove barriers to healthcare, research participation and careers in science and academia.

Talk Title: From Pixels to Biology: Artificial Intelligence for the next generation of Bioimage Analysis
15:30 - 16:15, Thursday 8 July 2027

Ignacio Arganda-Carreras is an Ikerbasque Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and is affiliated with the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) and Biofisika Institute. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, computer vision, and machine learning for bioimage analysis, with particular emphasis on developing methods that are robust, scalable, and accessible to the scientific community. He is a co-founder and core developer of Fiji and the creator of the Trainable Weka Segmentation plugin, and has contributed to widely used tools including MorphoLibJ, TrakEM2, BUnwarpJ and AnalyzeSkeleton. He leads the development of BiaPy, an open-source deep-learning platform for bioimage analysis and has recently worked on foundation-model-based and zero-shot approaches for microscopy, including DINOSim and PhenoMe. His work combines methodological development with open-source software and reproducible bioimage-analysis workflows.

[Photograph by Paula Arbide]