Speakers

Stefan W. Hell is a director at both the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen and at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany. He is credited with having conceived, validated and applied the first viable concept for breaking Abbe’s diffraction-limited resolution barrier in a light-focusing microscope and has received several awards: including the 2014 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience and the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Sandrine Lévêque-Fort is a CNRS Research Director at the Institute of molecular science (ISMO) in Paris Saclay University. She obtained her PhD on the development of a new acousto-optic imaging through scattering media in the Optical Lab of ESPCI in Paris. She then became a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Pr P. French at Imperial College, where she started to develop time resolved fluorescence microscopy but also structured illumination strategy. She joined the CNRS in 2001 to develop new configurations/methodologies to improve spatial and temporal resolution in time resolved fluorescence microscopy. Since 2009, she proposed various developments to enhance super-resolution microscopy in particular based on supercritical angle fluorescence but also by combining structured excitation with single molecule localization.

Gail McConnell is Professor of Biophotonics at the Department of Physics at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. Following a first degree in Laser Physics and Optoelectronics (1998) and PhD in Physics from the University of Strathclyde (2002), she obtained a Personal Research Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2003) and a Research Councils UK Academic Fellowship (2005), securing a readership in 2008 and Chair in 2012. The work in Gail’s group involves the design, development and application of linear and nonlinear optical instrumentation for biomedical imaging, from the nanoscale to the whole organism. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society, where she is the current Chair of the Light Microscopy Committee.

Anna Kreshuk joined EMBL in July 2018 as a Group Leader in the Cell Biology and Biophysics Unit. Her research focuses on machine learning-based methods for the analysis of biological images. Right now, she is especially interested in large-scale image and volume segmentation using sparse or weak supervision. Besides, Anna is leading the development of the ilastik software, aiming to make such methods available to life scientists without computational expertise. Previously, she was a PostDoc at the Heidelberg Collaboratory for Image Processing and a visiting scientist at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus. Anna holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Heidelberg and a Diploma in Mathematics from Lomonosov Moscow State University. In between the two degrees, she worked at CERN in Geneva as a scientific programmer for the ROOT framework.

Jason Swedlow OBE FRSE earned a BA Chemistry from Brandeis University (1982), a PhD Biophysics from UC San Francisco (1994) and postdoc’d at UCSF and Harvard Medical School (1994-1998). Dr Swedlow established his own laboratory at the University of Dundee as a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow (1998). He was awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellowship in 2002, named Professor of Quantitative Cell Biology in 2007, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2012, and an honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2021. He founded and runs the Open Microscopy Environment and Glencoe Software.

Prof. Stefanie Weidtkamp-Peters is the head of the Center for Advanced Imaging at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. Since March 2021 she is the chair of GermanBioImaging, the German Society for Microscopy and Image analysis. She is a cell biologist by training and is doing microscopy since her studies at the University of Würzburg. She did her PhD at the Fritz-Lipmann Institute of Age Research in Jena in 2007. As a postdoctoral research fellow at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf with a focus on fluorescence spectroscopy and FRET. Since then she is a well interested in bioimage data management.

Prof. Dr. Tilman E. Schäffer
Professor of Physics / Medical Engineering
University of Tübingen, Germany

2011-present Professor of Physics / Medical Engineering, University of Tübingen, Germany.
2007-2011 Professor of Applied Physics, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany.
2005 Habilitation in Physics, University of Münster, Germany.
2002-2007 Group leader, Physikalisches Institut, University of Münster, Germany.
1999-2002 Group leader, Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany.
1998 PhD in Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.
1996 M.A. in Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.
1989-1994 Study of Physics at the Universities of Heidelberg, Miami, and Santa Barbara.

Tilman Schäffer’s research focuses on the mechanics and dynamics of living cells, for which he develops and applies methods of scanning probe microscopy.

Alex is an Assistant Professor at the EPFL Global Health Institute and the Institute for Bioengineering. He obtained his BSc at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris and his MSc and PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, USA. After a postdoc in the department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, USA, he started his lab at EPFL where he combines engineering and microbiological approaches to understand how bacteria sense, respond and adapt to their mechanical environment. His multidisciplinary approach and novel technologies provide a deeper understanding of microbial physiology, ecology and infectious diseases.

Eija Jokitalo is a head of the Electron Microscopy Unit and group leader of Organelle structure group at the Institute of Biotechnology, at HiLIFE, University of Helsinki. She was the founding chair of the Biocenter Finland Electron Microscopy Technology Platform (since 2009), and currently is the chair of Biocenter Finland Biological Imaging Platform. Dr Jokitalo has extensive experience in biological imaging and is specialized on 3D-electron microscopy and correlative light/electron microscopy techniques and image analysis. Her own research focuses on studying the interplay between organelles and how organelle structure supports its functions.

Prof. Ricardo Henriques is a group leader at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, moving his laboratory in 2020 from University College London and Francis Crick Institute in the UK. His group uses optical and computational biophysics to study cell biology and host-pathogen interactions. He graduated in Physics, specialising in biophotonics and robotics. He finished his PhD in 2011, where he developed super-resolution microscopy technologies at the Musa Mhlanga lab. He then pursued postdoc research at Institut Pasteur Paris, studying HIV-1 T-cell infection through nanoscale imaging in the Christophe Zimmer lab.

Dr. Chew is the Inaugural Director of the Advanced Imaging Center (AIC) at Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus. He serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of France BioImaging and EuroBioImaging, and currently chairs the Global BioImaging Management Board. Prior to joining Janelia, Dr. Chew served as the Director of the Center for Advanced Microscopy at Northwestern University in Chicago. He has a keen interest in deciphering cytoskeletal regulation using advanced microscopy tools and tissue engineering. He is the Founder of Imaging Africa workshop, and the Africa Microscopy Initiative (AMI), an infrastructure- and community-building initiative for the whole continent.

Colinda Scheele is a group leader at the VIB-KULeuven Center for Cancer Biology in Leuven (BE). The main topic of her lab is to understand how healthy tissue architecture and environment prevent or promote the different steps of tumorigenesis, with a specific focus on tumorigenesis in the mammary gland. To study these highly dynamic processes, the Scheele lab uses and develops state-of-the-art imaging approaches, including 3D whole organ imaging and 4D intravital microscopy using imaging windows. These imaging tools are complemented with (spatial) omics approaches, as well as quantitative modelling to further elucidate the mechanisms of tissue transformation.