Invited Speakers
Kitty Crompton
Sarah Graham
Dirk-Peter Herten
Séamus Holden
Tamara Miljus
Aleks Ponjavic
Amir Rahmani
Tom Sheard
Ann Wheeler
Katrina Crompton completed her Master’s in Mathematics before studying for a PhD in Biosciences at Newcastle University supervised by Adam Wollman. In her research she develops new microscopes including single-molecule fluorescence and instruments designed to work in extreme environments, including microgravity.
Sarah is a PhD student in the University of York Physics of Life group supervised by Steven Quinn and Mark Leake. She is studying the effects of molecular crowding and other environmental changes on biomolecules using single-molecule FRET microscopy techniques. Specifically work so far has focused on DNA hairpins and their opening and closing dynamics and the SARS-CoV-2 pseudoknot which acts as the stimulatory sequence for frameshifting in the virus.
Dirk-Peter Herten is a Chair in Cell Biology of Membrane Proteins at the University of Birmingham shared by the Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and the School of Chemistry with his labs located in the Institute of Biomedical Research (IBR).
Dirk’s interdisciplinary research spans from microscopy techniques over switchable fluorescent probes to biological applications, like T-cell signalling in the context of inflammation. He has specialized in single-molecule microscopy enabling quantitative studies of the composition and dynamics of cellular structures and enzymatic reactions in living cells.
Dr Séamus Holden studies bacterial cell biology and biophysics using super-resolution microscopy and other advanced imaging methods. His primary biological focus is how bacteria remodel their cell wall, which is one of the most important targets for antibiotics.
Séamus studied Physics at the University of Oxford, followed by a DPhil in single molecule biophysics in the laboratory of Professor Achilles Kapanidis at Oxford. In 2011 he joined the laboratory of Professor Suliana Manley at EPFL as a post-doc, where he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Intra-European Fellow. In 2015, he started his own lab at the Centre for Bacterial Cell Biology, Newcastle University. In 2017 Séamus was awarded a Wellcome Trust & Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellowship to study physical principles of bacterial cell division and in 2020 he was awarded the British Biophysical Society Louise Johnson Early Career Award for “his work applying ground-breaking concepts in optical microscopy to study bacterial cell biophysics”. In 2022 he moved to the University of Warwick as an Associate Professor (Reader).
Tamara is a postdoc in the group of Professor Davide Calebiro at the University of Birmingham, where she is using fluorescence-based single-molecule microscopy to study conformational dynamics of beta-arrestins, intracellular proteins interacting with G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). Before moving to the UK, Tamara completed her PhD in structural biology at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, investigating molecular mechanisms of biased signalling in cannabinoid CB2 receptor.
