Call for Papers - Microscopy at a glance

Dr. Nabanita Chatterjee is a microscopy specialist with experience spanning academic research, imaging core facilities, and scientific instrumentation across India, the United States, Sweden, and Australia. Following a PhD in Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology and postdoctoral research in neuroscience, she transitioned into advanced microscopy applications, image analysis, and imaging workflow development.

Her interests lie at the intersection of microscopy, automation, and quantitative imaging, with a particular focus on solving practical challenges in biological imaging workflows. She has worked extensively with confocal, multiphoton, super-resolution, and high-content imaging platforms, supporting researchers from experimental design through data analysis.

More recently, her work has focused on integrating hardware, software, and computational tools to improve reproducibility, efficiency, and scalability in imaging. She is particularly interested in digital pathology, automated microscopy workflows, and the application of AI-assisted approaches to extract meaningful information from complex imaging datasets.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chatterjeen/

John Danial obtained a DPhil in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry from the University of Oxford as a Weidenfeld–Louis Dreyfus Scholar under the supervision of Professor Mark I. Wallace (now Professor of Chemistry at King’s College London). He then joined the group of Professor Ana Garcia-Saez (now Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics) at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the Interfaculty Institute of Biochemistry at the University of Tübingen as a Max Planck Society–funded postdoctoral research fellow.

Following this, he moved to the University of Cambridge as a postdoctoral research associate funded by EISAI and the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI), working with Professor Sir David Klenerman FRS (Royal Society Research Professor) at the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry and the UK DRI. During this period, he was also a College Research Associate at King’s College, Cambridge, and a Bye Fellow at Homerton College, Cambridge.

He is currently an MRC Career Development Fellow and a proleptic Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Experimental Biophotonics. His lab develops new instrumentation, assays, and software to probe and image protein structure with light. Their eventual aim is to democratise these technologies and use them to study and diagnose fatal neurodegenerative diseases.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-danial-b1021545/

Christian Franke studied Physics at the University of Würzburg, where he also completed his PhD in the group of Markus Sauer, focusing on the development and application of super-resolution fluorescence microscopy. He subsequently joined the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden as a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Marino Zerial, where he applied advanced imaging approaches to study intracellular membrane trafficking and endosomal organization.

He is currently Professor of Digitized Experimental Microscopy at the Institute of Applied Optics and Biophysics (IAOB), Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. His research focuses on the development of quantitative and computational optical methods that integrate optical engineering, super-resolution imaging, and data-driven analysis to investigate biological processes at nanometer resolution. His team develops new approaches for quantitative super-resolution microscopy, computational multiplexing, and high-throughput image analysis. These technologies are applied to study intracellular organization, nanoparticle uptake and trafficking, and endo-lysosomal biology, often in close collaboration with researchers in cell biology, photonics, and biomedical sciences. His work aims to translate advanced optical and computational imaging technologies into robust tools for quantitative cell biology and biomedical research."

Kirti Prakash is an interdisciplinary scientist trained in Computer Science (BSc/MSc, Aalto University, Finland) and Biology (PhD, Heidelberg University, Germany), with a focus on inventing new imaging and computational tools for cell biology and neuroscience. During his PhD, he developed a DNA imaging method that enabled some of the first high-resolution views of the epigenetic landscape of meiotic chromosomes and provided new insight into chromosome condensation, earning multiple awards including the Springer Best PhD Thesis Prize; his thesis was later published by Springer Nature as Chromatin Architecture. He has held research posts at the Carnegie Institution for Science (USA), the University of Cambridge (UK), the National Physical Laboratory (UK), and the Institute of Cancer Research (UK), where his work has included laser-free super-resolution microscopy and high-content imaging pipelines to quantify single-cell gene expression. His research has been recognised internationally through awards and invited lectures. Kirti is an elected Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society and serves as a scientific editor, panel expert, and reviewer for journals and funding bodies.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kirtiprakash7/

Carlas S. Smith is an interdisciplinary scientist with a background in Aerospace Engineering (MSc, Delft University of Technology) and Applied Physics (MSc, Delft University of Technology), specializing in the development of advanced imaging and information-processing tools for biological applications. During his PhD at the University of Massachusetts, he focused on optimal single-molecule localization microscopy, research that contributed to a career recognized by awards such as the 2022 Early Career Investigator Award for Paper of the Year from the Biophysical Society.  He has held an academic research position at the University of Oxford, and is currently an Associate Professor at Delft University of Technology. His work includes inventing noise-controlled reconstruction methods for structured illumination microscopy and developing open-source pipelines for single-photon avalanche diode arrays. His research has been supported by significant funding, including the Vidi and Veni grants from the NWO.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlas-smith-41060188/