We are delighted to announce our 2026 invited speakers
Liam Collins
Maximilia Frazao de Souza Degenhardt
Timea Feller
Laura Fumagalli
Leo Gross
Melanie Köhler
Shi-Xia Liu
Philip Moriarty
Stephen Rauschenbach
Simon Scheuring
Tom Siday
Wei-Feng Xue
I’m Timea Feller, a Wellcome Trust-funded Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. My research focuses on how the unique mechanical behaviour of fibrin is governed by the internal architecture within the fibres. This structure underpins critical biological processes as fibrin forms the backbone of blood clots, so its mechanics directly influence clot stability and the risk of thrombotic disease.
To explore these questions, I primarily use lateral fibre pulling, a technique that combines fluorescence microscopy with atomic force microscopy (AFM) to probe fibre-level mechanics. In addition, I employ AFM for high-resolution imaging and magnetic microrheology alongside complementary biophysical methods. By integrating these approaches, I aim to reveal the molecular principles underlying fibrin mechanics and their impact on biological function.
Laura Fumagalli is Reader in Condensed Matter Physics at the Department of Physics & Astronomy of the University of Manchester (UK) and staff researcher of the National Graphene Institute. She graduated in Electronic Engineering in 2002 (Polytechnic University of Milan - Italy and École Superior d’Electricité - France). She received her PhD in Information Technology in 2006 with a doctoral thesis on low-noise widebandwidth amplifiers at the Department of Electronics of Polytechnic University of Milan. She worked as post-doctoral researcher (2006-2010) and then lecturer (2010-2014) at the Department of Electronics of the University of Barcelona (Spain), where she pioneered the development of a novel nanoscopic technique - Scanning Dielectric Microscopy - that allows measuring the dielectric properties of matter on the nanoscale using a scanning probe. She joined the Condensed Matter Physics group of the University of Manchester (UK) in 2015. She was awarded the prestigious Ramon y Cajal fellowship by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science in 2014 and the ERC-Consolidator grant award ‘Liquid2DM’ by the European Research Council in 2018. Her research focuses on the study of electric and dielectric properties of bio and non-bio materials on the nano- and atomic scale, with particular interest in nanoconfined water and the solidliquid interface, biomembranes and biomolecules (DNA, proteins), van der Waals crystals and their heterostructures.
Dr Laura Fumagalli is the winner of the 2021 RMS Medal for Atomic Force Microscopy and Scanning Probe Microscopy, this will be presented at mmc2021.
Leo Gross is a Principal Research Scientist at IBM Research Europe – Zurich. He studied physics at the Free University of Berlin, at Tulane University, New Orleans, at University of Münster and received his PhD in physics in at FU Berlin in 2005. He joined the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in 2005 as a post doc in the group of Gerhard Meyer. Leo Gross pioneered atomic resolution of single molecules and charge-sensing on the atomic scale by atomic force microscopy (AFM). He develops and applies AFM and scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) for molecule identification, characterization and on-surface synthesis, and for studying charge transfer on the atomic scale.
Leo Gross received the Gerhard Ertl Young Investigator Award in 2010, the Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology in 2012 and the Silver Combustion Medal in 2020. He is Fellow of the American Physical Society and the European Academy of Sciences. He received an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2016 and an ERC Synergy Grant, together with Jascha Repp, University of Regensburg and Diego Peña, University of Santiago de Compostela, in 2021.
Dr. Köhler obtained her PhD in Biophysics from Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, in the group of Prof. Peter Hinterdorfer (Department of Applied Experimental Biophysics). In late 2016, she joined UCLouvain in Belgium as a postdoctoral researcher in the Nanobiophysics Lab led by Prof. David Alsteens, where she investigated the molecular mechanisms underlying virus–receptor interactions.
In 2022, she secured a competitive Leibniz Junior Research Group grant to establish the Mechanoreceptors junior research group at Leibniz-LSB@TUM, and in 2024 she was appointed TUM Junior Fellow at the Technical University of Munich. Her interdisciplinary group combines atomic force microscopy, nanodisc single-molecule analysis, molecular modelling, and human sensory trials to elucidate the molecular basis of oral texture perception mediated by mechanoreceptors. In addition, this sensory-biophysics platform is applied to broader food and flavour research questions, such as the binding of food-derived ligands to their cognate taste receptors.
Shi-Xia Liu was born in China on 26th of March 1970. She received her PhD in Chemistry from Lanzhou University (China) in 1998. As an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, she was at the University of Siegen (Germany) from 1999 to 2000. She then joined the group of Prof. Silvio Decurtins at the University of Bern (Switzerland) as a senior researcher (2000-2015). From 2016 to 2020, she was a lecturer at the Department of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Bern. She was appointed as a visiting Professor at Angers University, France in 2014 and at Trinity College Dublin, Irland in 2016. In October 2020, she received her Venia Legendi after successful habilitation. Since October 2024, she has become head of the W. Inäbnit Laboratory for Molecular Quantum Materials, Bern University and Werner Siemens Research Centre for Molecular Quantum Systems. Her research mainly focusses on the development of new organic functional materials for (opto)electronic applications.
Simon Scheuring is Distinguished Professor of Anesthesiology Research in the Department of Anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, USA. He is also Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, USA.
He is a trained biologist (Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland). During his MSc and PhD, he learned electron microscopy (EM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) for the structure determination of membrane proteins such as aquaporins and sugar transporters. During his postdoc and as research assistant (Institut Curie, Paris, France), he learned membrane physical chemistry and developed AFM for the study of native membranes and ventured into setting up his lab as a junior research director at the Institut Curie. Promoted to senior research director, he built a larger laboratory in Marseille (INSERM / Aix-Marseille Université, France). In 2017, he moved to Weill Cornell Medicine, where he got appointed as Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology (WCM, New York, USA). Simon Scheuring’s laboratory develops and applies AFM-technologies for the study of membrane phenomena, such as membrane protein structure, assembly, diffusion, and conformational dynamics of unlabeled single molecules, bridging structure and function. Over the past years, his laboratory has been instrumental in the development of High-Speed AFM (HS-AFM) methods, extracting quasi-atomic structural details from single molecule AFM data, and reaching millisecond temporal resolution for the analysis of conformational dynamics. In recent works, his laboratory combines HS-AFM with cryo-EM to acquire an integrated understanding of the dynamics and structures of membrane proteins.
Dr Tom Siday received a Master of Physics degree from the University of York (2015) and completed his PhD in Electronic & Electrical Engineering at University College London (2020). His PhD thesis focused on boosting the sensitivity of near-field microscopes through the development of perfectly absorbing terahertz detectors and resonant antenna probes.
After his PhD, Tom spent 3 years (2019-2022) as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Regensburg, Germany. After this he returned to the UK as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford (2023-2024). During this period, Tom was also awarded a Fulford Junior Research Fellowship at Somerville College. In these postdoctoral positions, he spent time developing new ways to access ultrafast dynamics on nanometre and atomic length scales and applied these techniques to a range of material systems: from two-dimensional semiconductors to light-harvesting materials.
Since 2024, Tom has been working as an Assistant Professor in the School of Physics at the University of Birmingham. His group (lightwave-collective.uk) works to sample and control the ultrafast dynamics of quantum materials over the shortest possible lengthscales.
