Keynote & Invited Speakers
Keynote Speaker
Ralf Jungmann
Talk Title: Localizomics: towards spatial omics using DNA-based super-resolution microscopy
Ralf Jungmann is a professor for Experimental Physics at LMU Munich and Max Planck Fellow at the MPI of Biochemistry in Martinsried. Jungmann studied physics at Saarland University and received his PhD in 2010 from the TU Munich. He then became an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University before joining LMU and MPIB.
Jungmann and his team are widely recognised for their ground-breaking developments and applications of DNA-based fluorescence microscopy, namely DNA-PAINT. DNA-PAINT is a super-resolution microscopy technique that uses short, transient DNA-DNA interactions to provide unrivalled spatial resolution and multiplexing. The method employs complementary DNA strand binding, allowing researchers to visualise cellular structures and molecules with precision previously thought unattainable. DNA-PAINT has unlocked new potentials in diverse scientific realms, from unravelling intricate biological processes at the molecular level to aiding advancements in material science and biomedicine. In two of his latest breakthrough studies, Jungmann and his team achieved Ångström-resolution fluorescence microscopy and spatial proteomics at single protein resolution in neurons, unravel the Mode of Action of monoclonal antibodies in cancer in the first study and uncovering a novel type of synapse in the latter.
Jungmann's contributions have been acknowledged with numerous awards. Furthermore, his work has fostered international collaborations and stimulated a new generation of researchers to think creatively about the applications of nanotechnology in the life sciences.
Invited Speakers
Confirmed invited speakers include:
Balpreet Singh Ahluwalia
Talk Title: Ultra-large field of view chip-based TIRF super-resolution microscopy for life sciences
Balpreet Singh Ahuwalia is a Professor at the Department of Physics and Technology at UiT, The Arctic University of Norway. He is also affiliated at the CLINTEC, Karolinska Institute, Sweden. Ahluwalia leads a transdisciplinary team with a research focus within advanced microscopy, spectroscopy, nanotechnology and its application with life sciences and biology. Ahluwalia is co-founder and Chief Scientific Offier at Chip NanoImaging AS, that develops high throughput photonic-chip-based TIRF microscopy platform. Ahluwalia is a receipt of Tycho Jæger Prize in Electro-Optics (2018) in Norway and UiT’s Research & Development Award in 2019 for the invention of chip-based nanoscopy.
Sophie Brasselet
Talk title: Polarized microscopy, towards molecular-organization imaging in cells and tissues
Sophie Brasselet is an optical physicist. She has obtained her PhD in 1997 at the University of Paris Sud, on the study of multipolar molecules applied to nonlinear optics in polymers. She then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at UCSD and Stanford University (USA) with W.E. Moerner on the development of single molecule imaging methods in cells. After six years at ENS Cachan (France) as an assistant professor, she was recruited as a CNRS researcher at Fresnel Institute (Marseille). She is now a CNRS research director and the director of this institute. She has been developing non-linear optical microscopy and super-resolved fluorescence microscopy based on the control of light polarization for the last fifteen years, with the goal to provide new imaging methods capable of accessing structural information in biological samples at the nanoscale. She is currently extending these approaches to 3D polarized imaging at high spatial resolution and with fast dynamics, as well as in scattering tissues, to adapt them to in vivo situations suitable for biomedical optics. She was awarded the CNRS silver medal (2016) as well as the Leon Brillouin Grand Prix of the Optical French Society (2022), and is an OPTICA fellow since 2020. She has given 80 invited conferences and published more than 140 peer reviewed articles.
Susan Cox
Talk title: Deep learning for data synthesis in fluorescence microscopy
Susan is a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Randall Division of Biophysics at King's College London. Following a PhD in transmission electron microscopy at Cambridge, she spent three years at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Los Alamos looking at the behaviour of the low temperature phases of strongly correlated electron systems. Her current primary interest is the development of new super-resolution localisation microscopy techniques, both through the development of optical systems and the creation of novel image analysis algorithms. She uses these techniques to investigate the behaviour of the cytoskeleton in live cells at the nanoscale. In 2015, she was awarded the RMS Medal for Light Microscopy and the President's Medal of the Society of Experimental Biology for the Cell Section.
Michelle Frei
Talk Title: Chemigenetic tools for live-cell fluorescence microscopy
Michelle Frei pursued her PhD studies in the lab of Professor Kai Johnsson at EPFL in Lausanne and MPI for Medical Research in Heidelberg. During her PhD she worked on the synthesis and characterization of photoactivatable probes for super-resolution microscopy as well as the engineering of the self-labeling protein tag HaloTag7 for fluorescence lifetime multiplexing. Her dissertation was awarded with the EPFL Thesis Distinction and the Prix Schläfli in Chemistry 2023. Michelle Frei then carried out postdoctoral research at the University of California San Diego in the group of Prof. Jin Zhang focusing on the development of chemigenetic fluorescent biosensors for application in super-resolution microscopy. In summer 2024 Michelle will take up her position as Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Chemical Biology and Molecular Imaging at ETH Zurich.
Na Ji
Talk title: Imaging the brain at high spatiotemporal resolution
Na Ji studied chemistry and physics as an undergraduate in the University of Science and Technology of China and later a graduate student at University of California Berkeley. She received her PhD in Chemistry in 2005 under the guidance of Yuen-Ron Shen. In 2006, she moved to Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and worked with Eric Betzig on improving the speed and resolution of in vivo brain imaging. She became a group leader in Janelia in 2011. In 2017, she moved to the Department of Physics and Department of Molecular Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley as the Luis Alvarez Memorial Chair in Experimental Physics. She is also affiliated with the Bioengineering, Biophysics, and Vision Science Graduate Programs, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, and serves as a faculty scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In addition to imaging technology development, her lab applies the resulting techniques to outstanding problems in neurobiology.
Alexander Johnson
Talk title: Multi-scale characterization of plant clathrin-mediated endocytosis
My research has focused on the molecular mechanism of clathrin-mediated endocytosis in plants. Although my PhD was in neuronal communication, I started working with plants in the labs of Dr. Gregory Vert and Dr. Christien Merrifield (CNRS, France). At this time, how endocytosis functioned in plants was poorly characterized. This is because plants present many technical challenges to image dynamic sub-cellular processes, like endocytosis, at appropriate resolutions. Thus, we established a reliable method to apply TIRF-M with automated unbiased analysis to quantify live single events of endocytosis in intact plants. I then joined the group of Prof. Jiri Friml (ISTA, Austria) where I optimized the use of SIM to further improve resolve the dynamic interplay of proteins at endocytic events. In addition, we also developed the routine use of metal replicas of unroofed plant cells with STEM tomography to directly visualize plant endocytosis events in 3D for the first time. Using these quantitative imaging tools, we have significantly updated the working model of plant endocytosis and uncovered that it is evolutionarily unique from other eukaryotic model systems. I am currently a post doc in the lab of Dr. Kareem Elsayad (Medical University of Vienna, Austria), where we are developing novel optical microscopy and spectroscopy techniques to elucidate microscopic scale mechanical, structural, and dynamic properties of biological samples.
Florian Jug
Talk Title: From Content-Aware Denoising to Semantic Unmixing of Microscopy Data
Dr. Florian Jug holds a PhD in Computational Neuroscience from the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science at ETH Zurich. His research aims at pushing the boundary of what AI and machine learning can do to better analyze and quantify biological data. At HT, Dr. Jug covers the full breadth of bio-image computing, from research on novel methods for computer vision and machine learning, all the way to offering bio-image analysis as a service.
Florian Jug is a strong proponent of open access science, open AI and ML methods, and open source software. His team is a core contributor to Fiji (~100,000 active users) and collaboratively develops open methods such as CARE, Noise2Void, PN2V, DivNoising, etc. He organizes scientific conferences (e.g the I2K conference), workshops (e.g. the BIC workshops at top-tier computer vision conferences) and various practical courses on machine learning for bio-image analysis (e.g. DL@MBL in Woods Hole) or microscopy (e.g. Quantitative Imaging at Cold Spring Harbor).
Steven F. Lee
Talk title: Multidimensional Super-resolution Imaging: Wasting Light to Learn New Things
Research in TheLeeLab centers on developing new biophysical methods to answer fundamental biological questions, primarily through single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy and multidimensional super-resolution imaging. Professor Lee completed his DPhil in Physical Chemistry with Dr. Mark Osborne, before postdoctoral work with both Prof Sir David Klenerman (FRS MedSci) and Prof W.E Moerner (Nobel Prize Chemistry 2014). He manages a research team of talented researchers who profoundly believe molecules should be looked at one at a time. Professor Lee is the 2017 recipient of the Marlow Prize in Physical Chemistry from the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Heba Sailem
Talk Title: Quantitative and AI technologies for knowledge discovery from bioimage data
Dr Heba Sailem is a Senior Lecturer of Biomedical AI and Data Science at the School of Cancer and Pharmaceutical Sciences at King’s College London.
Her research is focused on developing artificial intelligence and bioinformatics approaches to enable personalised cancer patient treatment. In 2022, she has been awarded an eight-year Wellcome Career Development Award that aims to decipher the tumour microenvironment interactions. The group work is highly interdisciplinary and combines insights from histopathology, genetics, pharmaceutical medicine, and cell biology.
Before joining King's, she worked between the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford and University of Zurich as a Sir Henry Wellcome Research Fellow and Corpus Christi Junior Research Fellow. There, she has developed several machine learning approaches to tackle challenges in pattern recognition and interpretability of large-scale biomedical image data and pioneered knowledge-driven machine learning for utilising prior knowledge when analysing large scale biomedical data.
Dr Sailem did her PhD at the Institute of Cancer Research in London specializing in integrating phenotypic data with gene expression and modelling of the relationship between cell signalling and its context. She holds a BSc in Computer Information Systems and MSc in Data Warehousing and Data Mining.
Erdinc Sezgin
Talk title: Measuring biophysical properties of cells and nanoscale bioparticles in health and disease
Erdinc Sezgin studied Genetics and Bioengineering at Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey. He performed his PhD with Prof Petra Schwille at the International Max Planck Research School in Dresden on membrane biophysics. After a short postdoc with Kai Simons at MPI-CBG, he moved to University of Oxford with EMBO and Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowships to study biophysics of immune signalling. In 2020, he became a SciLifeLab fellow and group leader in Karolinska Institutet Sweden. His lab (CSI:Nano Lab) develops and applies advanced imaging and synthetic biology approaches to reveal the biophysical principles underlying cellular processes with a focus on biomembranes.
Jim Swoger
Talk Title: Multi-scale Mesoscopic Imaging
After completing his Ph.D. at McMaster University, Jim Swoger worked with Ernst Stelzer at EMBL Heidelberg on the development of confocal microscopes, a Multiple Imaging Axis Microscope, and Selective Plane Illumination Microscopy (SPIM). He then joined James Sharpe at the Human Genetics Unit of the MRC in Edinburgh to work on Optical Projection Tomography (OPT) and continue to develop SPIM. After a year in Edinburgh, he moved with the Sharpe lab to the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona to continue the development of optical imaging technologies. Since 2017 he has been the head of the Mesoscopic Imaging Facility at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) Barcelona.
Laura Wiggins
Talk Title: Making phenomenal insights: CellPhe 2 for enhanced cell phenotyping from time-lapse images
Dr. Laura Wiggins is currently a post-doctoral research associate in the Pyne Lab at the University of Sheffield where her work involves the development of TopoStats, an open-source toolkit for automated processing and analysis of atomic force microscopy images. Laura also led the development of CellPhe throughout her PhD, an automated toolkit for cell phenotyping from time-lapse images. She has received a number of awards for this work including the University of York’s Open Research Award, best talk at the BACR’s Response and Resistance in Cancer Therapy, and the K.M. Stott prize for research excellence.