Editors
Michelle Peckham
Michelle Peckham obtained her degree in Biology from the University of York in 1981 and her PhD from University College London in 1984. She then spent 2 years at KCL Biophysics working on muscle birefringence, followed by a year at the University of San Francisco, working on fluorescence polarisation microscopy, and then 2 years at the University of York, working on insect flight muscle contraction. She became a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the department of Biophysics at KCL in 1990, when she set up her own group working on muscle and cytoskeleton, and as part of that work, she began using confocal microscopy. She moved to the University of Leeds in 1997, and became Professor of Cell Biology in 2010. She uses a number of different imaging techniques in her work, from confocal, deconvolution and super-resolution imaging, to transmission and scanning electron microscopy, as well as cryo-electron microscopy. She was president of the Royal Microscopical Society from 2016 – 2019.
Peter Nellist
Pete Nellist is a Professor in the Department of Materials, and a Tutorial Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. He leads a research group that focuses on the applications and development of high-resolution electron microscope techniques, in particular scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), including atomic resolution Z-contrast imaging, ptychography, electron energy-loss and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and applications of spherical aberration correctors. Pete gained his PhD from the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Since then he has worked in academia and in the commercial world in the UK, USA and Republic of Ireland. In 2007 he was awarded the Burton Medal by the Microscopy Society of America for exceptional contributions to microscopy, and in 2013 the Ernst Ruska Prize of the German Microscopy Society. He is a former President of the Royal Microscopical Society he is currently a Board Member of the European Microscopy Society.
Scientific Editors
Kurt Anderson
Kurt I. Anderson is a cell biologist with a long-standing interest light microscopy. Following his doctoral work on actin dynamics in cell migration with Vic Small at the Institute for Molecular Biology in Salzburg, he completed a short post-doc with Rob Cross at the Marie Curie Cancer Research Institute (Oxted) examining the adhesion dynamics of fish keratocytes. Dr. Anderson then moved to the newly formed Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, where he set up the light microscopy facility. In Dresden he continued to work on actin dynamics, and demonstrated in 2005 that the leading edge is a lipid diffusion barrier. The same year he was recruited to the Beatson Institute in Glasgow, where his lab pioneered the use of advanced fluorescence imaging techniques such as FRAP and FLIM-FRET to study the molecular dynamics of disease and response to therapy in pre-clinical cancer models. In 2012 he was the first recipient of the Royal Microscopical Society Life Sciences Medal for outstanding achievements applying microscopy in the field of cell biology. In early 2016 he moved to the Francis Crick Institute, where he leads the Crick Advanced Light Microscopy Facility (CALM).
Vinayak P. Dravid
Vinayak P. Dravid is the Abraham Harris Chaired Professor of Materials Science & Engineering. He received his B.Tech. from IIT Bombay in 1984 and joined Northwestern soon after his PhD from Lehigh University in 1990. He also serves as the founding Director of the NUANCE Center and the NSF-NNCI supported SHyNE Resource. SHyNE is the center of excellence for instrumentation/facility infrastructure in the Midwest.
Professor Dravid’s scholarly interests revolve broadly around “nanoscale” solutions to “gigaton” challenges of energy and environment. He has a diverse research portfolio covering advanced microscopy, nanotechnology, energy policy and emerging educational paradigms. His Google analytics include over 740+ archival journal publications, H-index of more than ~118, more than two dozen issued/pending patents. Some of his patents are licensed to start-up companies related to nanotechnology for environment and sensor/diagnostic systems.
As a Clarivate Analytics’ highest cited researcher for many years, Professor Dravid’s awards/honors include Fellowships to inaugural class of fellows of the Microscopy Society of America (MSA) and Microanalysis Society (MAS), among others. He is the recipient of the ACerS Robert L. Coble Award and the joint ACerS & Japanese Ceramic Society’s Richard M. Fulrath Award, MSA’s Burton Medal, among others. He is an honorary life-member of MRS India (MRSI), and Hsuen Lee fellow of the Chinese Academy of Science. He has been elected to Northwestern’s Faculty Honor Roll for several years for excellence in teaching.
Professor Dravid has served as advisor and consultant to metrology, energy/petrochemical companies, IP firms, the Chicago museums. He advises NGOs, professional society outreach programs, international organizations and private sector about science, technology and policy. One of his passions is to enhance societal and global appreciation for science and technology, especially energy, environment, and sustainability through the lens of microscopy and nanotechnology.
Achim Hartschuh
Professor Achim Hartschuh studied Physics at the Universities of Tübingen and Stuttgart, Germany. He obtained his Diploma in 1997 and his PhD in 2001 from the University of Stuttgart working on ultrafast time-resolved optical spectroscopy of molecular systems. In 2001 he joined the group of Prof. Lukas Novotny at the Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, USA, as a postdoc. There, he learned about Nano Optics, near-field optical microscopy and spectroscopy as well as other microscopy techniques. In 2002 he became Junior professor at the Institute of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry, University of Siegen, Germany, where he teamed up with Prof. Alfred Meixner. After moving to the University of Tübingen in 2005 he accepted a call for a professor position at the Chemistry Department of the LMU Munich in 2006. In 2011 he received an ERC starting grant for the development of new near-field optical techniques. From 2006 to 2019 he was principal investigator of the DFG Excellence Cluster Nanosystems Initiative Munich (NIM). Since 2020 he is principal investigator of the DFG Excellence Cluster e-conversion, for which he is now also one of the speakers. His work focuses on the development and application of new techniques for optical imaging and spectroscopy with high spatial and temporal resolution.
Carolyn Larabell
Carolyn Larabell is Professor and Vice-Chair of the Department of Anatomy at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, with a joint appointment as Advanced Light Source Professor at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is also the Founding Director of the National Center for X-ray Tomography (NCXT), an NIGMS-NIH and DOE-BER supported Biomedical Technology Research Resource. She trained as a Cell Biologist and has a long history of developing and implementing new technologies for imaging cells. With a background in light and electron microscopy, she recognized the need for a mesoscale imaging technology to fill the information gap between these two technologies. Therefore, she began investigating the use of ‘soft’ x-rays to image subcellular structures in whole, hydrated cells at a resolution of about 35 nm. To determine the position of molecules with respect to cell structures, she developed cryo fluorescence tomography using a confocal microscope equipped with a cryogenic immersion lens (US Patent #7852554) and more recently a cryo structured illumination microscope (cryoSIM). Using correlated fluorescence and x-ray tomography of the exact same cell, we can determine the position of specific molecules with respect to intact cellular structures. These technologies have broad biological applications, imaging from small prokaryotic organisms to single mammalian cells obtained from tissue.
Jian Liu
Professor Jian Liu is Dean of School of Instrumentation Science and Engineering at Harbin Institute of Technology, China, and Honorary Professor at the University of Nottingham, UK. He obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology and did his postdoctoral training in Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford. His academic interests lie in the theories and implementations of optical microscopes, in particular the development of confocal microscopes, photonics, applied optics and optical metrology. He is member of Subject Appraisal Group of 8th Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council. He is also a Council Member of China Instrument and Control Society and Chinese Society for Measurement, member of ISO/TC213 and China SAC/TC240 as well which are both served for geometrical products specifications.
Gail McConnell FRMS
Gail is Chair of Biophotonics at the Department of Physics at the University of Strathclyde. 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. Since 2004, Gail has received over £9M of research funding from a range of sources including EPSRC, MRC, BBSRC, EU and industry. 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.
Ulla Neumann
Ulla Neumann is interested in all aspects of botany but has always been fascinated by the complexity and beauty of plant cells as revealed by any microscopy technique. Since 2008, Ulla is the transmission electron microscopy expert in the Central Microscopy facility of the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, with a strong expertise in sample preparation techniques including high pressure freezing and freeze-substitution. As TEM expert, she adds an ultrastructural, cell biological angle to many research projects of our Institute with topics as varied as seed coat development, morphogenesis of different leaf shapes, plant-pathogen interactions, or stamen maturation in barley. As part of a microscopy service group, she is also connected to the wide array of other state-of-the-art microscopy techniques used in the field of plant research. In recent years, Ulla has been particularly interested in 3D EM techniques and correlative light and electron microscopy approaches in the field of plant microscopy.
Jens Randel Nyengaard
Professor Jens Nyengaard was educated as a medical Doctor at Aarhus University, Denmark, in 1989 followed by 4 years of clinical medical training at different clinical departments. He started stereological quantifications of rodent and human kidneys following normal and pathological development as a medical student and research fellow before completing a postdoc at Washington University in St. Louis, USA in 1992-93. The aim of his professorship starting in 2008 at Core Center for Molecular Morphology, Dept. of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University has been to maintain and further develop its highly esteemed international position in quantitative bioimaging and at the same time, more efficiently embed molecular microscopy in its field of neuroresearch/biomedicine/clinical research. They have introduced and implemented design-unbiased sampling techniques in molecular microscopy. They use histological, immunohistochemical and in situ hybridization, anterograde and retrograde tract tracing and tissue clearing techniques in combination with quantitative (stereology) methods. Different microscopical platforms include light microscopy, fluorescence microscopy, (2-photon) confocal laser scanning microscopy including FRET, FLIM, FRAP, FLIP and FCS, focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy, serial block-face scanning electron microscopy and immuno-transmission electron microscopy etc.
Mark Rainforth
Mark Rainforth (Professor FREng, University of Sheffield) took the top first class BMet degrees from the Department of Metallurgy in Sheffield in 1984. Prof Rainforth continued his career in Industry before taking a PhD in the School of Materials in Leeds in 1990, after which he moved as an academic to the Department of Materials in Sheffield. Winner of the IOM3 Rosenhain Medal and past President, Royal Microscopical Society, he is recognised for his work on the characterisation of a wide range of advanced materials and surfaces. He has published 306 refereed scientific papers and is co-author of the book ‘Ceramic Microstructures’.