Elizabeth Hillman
Gail McConnell
Serge Mostowy
Quentin Ramasse
Yannick Schwab
Neil Wilson
14:35GMT - Invited Talk
Columbia University
Professor Hillman has pioneered a number of in-vivo imaging techniques including, notably, her ground-breaking work in high-speed, single objective light-sheet imaging through her invention of swept, confocally aligned planar excitation (SCAPE) microscopy. SCAPE permits ultra-fast, volumetric microscopy of behaving organisms and was originally published in Nature Photonics in 2015. She has since collaborated with groups worldwide to share and optimize SCAPE for myriad novel application areas, bringing fundamentally new imaging capabilities to previously intractable dynamic specimens.
In addition to this work Elizabeth’s lab group works in all manner of directions developing biomedical engineering solutions using optical and biophotonic approaches. She has also leveraged these imaging tools to make important scientific contributions to our understanding of brain physiology and blood flow regulation. Her long and varied list of publications is evidence of a gifted research engineer and interdisciplinary scientist.
She contributes deeply to the international community of optical imaging engineers and is stalwart in her presence in conference organising committees, and review committees that promote the use of microscopy and the ‘light sciences’ in biomedical and clinical research. Full testimony to Elizabeth’s emerging position as one of the premier PI’s in her field are her list of publications in the last few years including recently published work applying SCAPE microscopy to decode how individual neurons shape our sense of smell.
13:45GMT - Invited Talk
University of Strathclyde
Gail McConnell 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.
14:10GMT - Invited Talk
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Professor Mostowy’s research focuses on the cell biology of host-pathogen interactions and in particular, how the cytoskeleton might be deployed to defend the cell against bacterial infections. He has applied cutting-edge microscopy techniques to illuminate new roles for autophagy and a lesser known component of the cytoskeleton, septins, in host defence and cell homoeostasis. He has also developed the zebrafish model to investigate cell biology of infection in vivo, using bacterial, fungal and parasitic infection agents.
Serge started his independent research group at Imperial College in 2012, before moving to London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in 2018. He has amassed a tremendous body of work in this relatively short space of time, with over 40 corresponding author publications, many of which have been highlighted with journal covers and scientific press highlights as well as reaching mainstream media outlets. He has organised several scientific meetings including Cellular Microbiology UK, Zebrafish Infection UK and an EMBO Workshop on septin biology (to be repeated next year - coronavirus-permitting).
He sits on several editorial and grant evaluation boards, and has been invited to present many seminars at major conferences as well as university seminar series. As an independent PI, four PhD students have so far completed their theses and gained prestigious postdoctoral positions, four post-docs have earned independent fellowships, and one post-doc is about to move to an independent group leader position.
Serge has applied and advocated microscopy applications, such as super-resolution microscopy and automated image analysis, and the genetic tractability of zebrafish larvae to enable infection biology discovery and human health impact. He is driven to understand the role of septins in innate immunity at the molecular, cellular, and whole organism level, which will have important consequences for enhancing host defence.
Quentin is a prolific, world-class and world-recognised researcher who has pioneered the development of advanced STEM techniques, and has successfully applied these techniques to address challenging materials science questions in nanomaterials as well as energy-related and electronic materials.
As the Director of the SuperSTEM Facility for the past 10 years, he has expanded the capabilities and research activities, with the first UK NION UltraSTEM 100 and the new state-of-the-art NION UltraSTEM 100MC “Hermes”, and has been exceptionally successful in pushing the boundaries of what is possible in terms of resolution and spectroscopy.
Quentin is still ‘hands on’ as a consummate electron microscopist and researcher with the highest standards of excellence. In addition to his expert knowledge and skills, he is also an inspiration to young and not-quite-so-young researchers.
Quentin is also the Professor of Advanced Electron Microscopy at the University of Leeds, organising and teaching at the SuperSTEM Summer School for Advanced Aberration-
Corrected STEM and Spectroscopy, thereby helping to educate the next generation of advanced microscopists.
16:40GMT - Invited Talk
EMBL Heidelburg
Dr Schwab has led his own laboratory and EM facility at EMBL for the last eight years, having led the EM facility at IGBMC for seven years before that.
The key advances he has made include:
Dr Schwab’s technique and technology development work has been applied to a broad range of bioscience research, including cell biology, neuroscience, cancer biology, developmental biology, virology and microbiology. He is a key member of the international microscopy community and leads a number of international courses, workshops and symposia. It is a timely moment to pause and recognise his contributions to date, with the knowledge that he is poised to revolutionise the application of electron microscopy in the life sciences in the near future.
16:15GMT - Invited Talk
University of Warwick
Dr Wilson’s research combines areas “traditional” to microscopy such as advanced scanning probe microscopy and electron microscopy, with synchrotron-based ARPES. His work on the two-dimensional materials such as graphene and boron nitride resulted in the understanding of the intrinsic charging phenomena in these novel two-dimensional materials.
Neil is well known to multiple groups in UK and abroad, as an inquisitive and enthusiastic scientist. He has merged the knowledge of a true microscopist with material science, organic chemistry and engineering to result in publications in the top journals of Nature publishing group and American Chemical Society.
Neil’s activity in the RMS, as part of the Society’s AFM and Scanning Probe Microscopies Section, has been equally enthusiastic. He has helped to establish this field in the UK on an equal footing with countries such as Switzerland and USA, where scanning probe and atomic force microscopy was pioneered.