Virtual Frontiers in Bioimaging 2020

Leo Carlin

Beatson Institute

Leo Carlin studied immunology as an undergraduate at UCL and made his first attempts at fluorescence microscopy as a project student there. His passion for imaging immunology was cemented by trying to understand intercellular communication and regulation in highly-dynamic immune cells using advanced microscopy modalities first as a PhD student with Dan Davis at Imperial, then during post-docs with Tony Ng and Frédéric Geissmann at KCL. Leo’s group, initially at Imperial and now at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute try to understand how immune cell behaviour, heavily shaped by the context of specialised vascular beds like the lung and liver, influence the development and progression of cancer. He is also fortunate to lead the Beatson Advanced Imaging Resource (BAIR).

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Anne Carpenter

Broad Institute

Dr. Carpenter is an Institute Scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Her research group develops algorithms and strategies for large-scale experiments involving images. The team’s open-source CellProfiler software is used by thousands of biologists worldwide (www.cellprofiler.org). Carpenter is a pioneer in image-based profiling, the extraction of rich, unbiased information from images for a number of important applications in drug discovery and functional genomics.  Carpenter completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and MIT’s Computer Sciences/Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Her PhD is in cell biology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Carpenter has been named an NSF CAREER awardee, an NIH MIRA awardee, a Massachusetts Academy of Sciences fellow (its youngest at the time), a Genome Technology “Rising Young Investigator”, and is listed in Deep Knowledge Analytics’ top-100 AI Leaders in Drug Discovery and Advanced Healthcare.

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Susan Cox

King's College London

Dr Susan Cox works at the Randall Centre for Cell and Molecular Biophysics, developing fluorescence microscopy techniques and applying them to discover new cell biology at the nanoscale. In 2011 she was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, which she used to develop a substantial research program based around localisation microscopy, and methods to extract more information from super-resolution image data. SC is best known as the developer of Bayesian analysis of blinking and bleaching (3B), a method for analysing extremely dense localisation microscopy image series. Its importance has been recognised with the award of the Royal Microscopical Society light microscopy medal and the Society of Experimental Biology Presidents Medal. More recently, she has explored the limits of localisation in terms of speed and accuracy. She mathematically described the role of the size of the point spread function size in limiting information transmission speed and developed a machine learning based approach to remove poor fits from the super resolution image. Since it is obviously more desirable to avoid poor fits in the first place, she developed Haar Wavelet Kernel analysis (HAWK), an approach to localisation microscopy data analysis which avoids artifacts and ensures the results reflect the underlying structure of the sample.

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Tim Craggs

University of Sheffield

Tim Craggs is a lecturer at the University of Sheffield, UK (appointed 2016). He is an expert in the development and application of Förster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) methods to biological systems, with particular experience in DNA-protein interactions.  He completed his PhD (Cambridge, UK) developing single-molecule and ensemble methods to study protein folding. Subsequently, he helped to establish a new single-molecule lab (St Andrews) developing FRET approaches to study the structure-specific nucleases XPF and FEN1. He won a prestigious Lindemann Trust Fellowship to continue his investigation of DNA-protein interactions (specifically DNA Polymerase I) at Yale with Cathy Joyce (2010), and returned to the UK to work with Achillefs Kapanidis (Oxford, 2011) where he used smFRET to determine the structure and dynamics of a protein-DNA complex. His multidisciplinary skills span DNA and protein biochemistry, ensemble and single-molecule biophysics and molecular modelling. His current research is focussed on understanding the conformational dynamics of biomolecules.

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Siân Culley

King's College London, UK

MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, University College London

Siân Culley is a postdoc in the Quantitative Imaging and Nanobiophysics group at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology at UCL. After doing an MSci project with Prof. Jonathan Ashmore in two-photon imaging of calcium signalling in inner hair cells, she moved into the field of super-resolution microscopy for her PhD with Dr Angus Bain investigating photophysical processes in CW-STED microscopy. In 2014 she joined Ricardo Henriques’ group, and her current research interests lie in developing open source hardware and analytics for live cell super-resolution microscopy. She also has an active interest in promoting women in microscopy.

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Julia Edgar

University of Glasgow

Julia Edgar is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow and Visiting Staff Scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Experimental Medicine, Goettingen.  She obtained her PhD in Developmental Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh and held a Multiple Sclerosis Society Fellowship, before becoming a member of academic staff at Glasgow University. Her research focusses largely on how the myelinating cells of the central nervous system support the function and survival of the myelinated axon.  She has expertise in several imaging methods including transmission electron microscopy and live cell imaging in vitro.

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Johannes Hohlbein

Wageningen University & Research

After obtaining a Ph.D. in Physics (2008, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany), Johannes Hohlbein worked as a postdoc in the ‘Gene Machines’ group of Achilles Kapanidis at the University of Oxford. Since 2012 he is working in the Laboratory of Biophysics at Wageningen University & Research (The Netherlands), first as an assistant professor and currently as a tenured associate professor. His lab looks into the amazing world of DNA-protein interactions utilizing methods of single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy and super-resolution microscopy.

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Izzy Jayasinghe

University of Sheffield

Izzy Jayasinghe is a Senior Research Fellow and a UKRI Future Leader Fellow in the Department of Molecular Biology & Biotechnology in the University of Sheffield. Her research has focused on developing new optical microscopy techniques for studying the organisation of the molecules of life, particularly proteins, within the heart. Currently, she is developing a series of methodologies which enable super-resolution microscopy in the broader Life Sciences such as clinical and environmental research. Prior to moving to Sheffield, Izzy completed a PhD in Physiology in Auckland (New Zealand) and two postdoctoral fellowships in Queensland (Australia) and Exeter where she established a track record in developing and applying new optical imaging methods. She established her independent research group in the University of Leeds in 2015 where developed adaptations of optical imaging methods such as DNA-PAINT and Expansion microscopy to study pathological nanoscale remodelling in the failing heart.

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Christophe Leterrier

CNRS - Aix Marseille Université

After studying engineering at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles, Christophe Leterrier turned to biology and completed a Neuroscience PhD on cannabinoid receptor trafficking in neurons (2006). He then did a postdoc and obtained a research position in 2011, studying the organization of the initial segment of the axon in Marseille. In 2017, he started the NeuroCyto lab thanks at the Institute of Neurophysiopathology in Marseille. Following the discovery of new axonal actin structures: rings, hotspots and trails, the lab focuses its efforts on understanding their molecular organization and functions using a range of microscopy techniques, including super-resolution and correlative approaches.

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Aleks Ponjavic

University of Leeds

Aleks obtained a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London, where he applied novel fluorescence microscopy techniques to study confined fluids. He then moved to the Chemistry department in Cambridge, where he worked on new single-molecule and light-sheet microscopy tools for investigating the behaviour and organisation of membrane proteins in T cells. In 2020, Aleks starts his own lab as a University Academic Fellow at the Bragg Centre for Materials Research in Leeds. Here, his lab will focus on the application of high-speed fluorescence imaging to push beyond the temporal limits of single-molecule and super-resolution fluorescence microscopy.

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Alice Pyne

University of Sheffield, UK

Alice Pyne is a Lecturer in Polymers/Soft Matter & MRC/UKRI Innovation Fellow in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Sheffield. Alice has over a decade of experience in scanning probe microscopy, spanning high-speed and high-resolution imaging, probe development and cantilever sensing. Alice’s current research aims to understand how variations in DNA structure can affect fundamental biological processes such as replication and transcription. She uses high-resolution AFM to observe variability in structure and conformation in individual DNA molecules and  to understand how these variations influence interactions with oligonucleotides and proteins, with a long-term view to improved development of therapeutics.

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Emmanuel Reynaud

University College Dublin

Dr Emmanuel G. Reynaud is a Lecturer in Cell Biology at University College Dublin. After a PhD in Life Sciences from the University of Paris XI/Orsay, he received an EMBO Long Term Fellowship and moved to the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg Germany where he developed new methods in Cell Biology including laser nanosurgery approaches to study the Golgi biogenesis. He was later involved in the development of the Light Sheet based Fluorescence Microscopy as a member of the Light Microscopy Group headed by Ernst H.K. Stelzer. His laboratory is combining an R&D prototyping space and a cell biology laboratory to investigate the functions of epithelia in healh and diseases using a wide range of model systems from coral reefs to single vesicle. In 2014, he was awarded the Chevalier (Knight) of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, one of the highest civilian honours bestowed on academics and educators by the French state.

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Giulia Zanetti

Birbeck, University of London

After undergraduate studies in Italy and Australia, Giulia completed her PhD in Oxford (2004-2009), working on cryo-tomography studies of viral glycoproteins. After a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology (ISMB) at Birkbeck College in London. In 2014 Giulia was awarded a Dorothy Hodgkin Royal Society fellowship, which kick-started her lab. Currently her group is pushing the boundaries of cryo-tomography to understand mechanisms of complex membrane trafficking processes. Integration with biochemical techniques and collaboration with labs who use complementary approaches is helping to understand how the COPII coat remodels membrane and how this process is regulated. 

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