Next generation fluorescent probes to image complex biological systems

Susan Cox

King's College London, UK

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.

Marina Kuimova

Imperial College London, UK

Marina Kuimova is a Professor of Chemical Physics at Imperial College London. Marina obtained her Master’s Degree at Moscow State University (Russia), and a doctorate at the University of Nottingham (UK) under the supervision of Professor M. W. George in 2006.  Following a postdoctoral appointment with Professor David Phillips at Imperial, she became a group leader and an EPSRC Life Science Interface Fellow (in 2007) and an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellow (in 2010). She was appointed as a lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at Imperial in 2012 and promoted to a Readership in 2016 and a Professorship in 2022. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a member of the Editorial Board of an IoP journal Methods and Applications of Fluorescence. She has received numerous awards and honors for her work, including 2009 Roscoe the Westminster Medals at the SET for Britain, UK Houses of Parliament; 2011 Grammaticakis-Neumann Prize of the Swiss Chemical Society, 2012 British Biophysical Society Young Investigator Award, 2012 Royal Society of Chemistry Harrison-Meldola Prize, 2013 ChemComm Emerging Investigator Lectureship, the 2014 IUPAP C6 Young Scientist Prize in Biological Physics and Society of Porphyrins and Phthalocyanines Young Investigator Award, 2020.

Michelle Peckham

University of Leeds, UK

I graduated in Biology (Physiology of Organisms) at the University of York in 1981, and went on to do my PhD with Prof. Roger Woledge in the Physiology Department at University College London, on the energetics of muscle contraction. I was awarded my PhD in 1984, worked briefly with Roger for a couple of months, before moving to the Biophysics Department at Kings College London, where I worked with Professor Malcolm Irving to demonstrate that birefringence could be used as a reporter of myosin cross bridge orientation in skeletal muscle (1985-7). I then worked at UCSF (San Francisco)(1987-8) before returning to the Biology Department at the University of York, to work with Professors David White and John Sparrow on insect flight muscle kinetics (1988-1990). As part of that work, we used the flight muscle of Drosophila Melanogaster as a model system. Mutations in contractile proteins were engineered into flight muscle actin, and I used sophisticated biophysical measurements to determine effects on contraction, resulting in a paper in Nature (1990). I was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to move to the Biophysics Department, KCL in 1990, where I started my own lab, and began to use molecular biology and cell culture techniques to investigate the cytoskeleton in cultured muscle cells. I moved to the University of Leeds in 1997, becoming a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader then Professor in 2010. I developed a strong interest in imaging and confocal microscopy alongside my interests in the cytoskeleton, developing super-resolution approaches at Leeds about 5-10 years ago, including the development of Affimers for STORM. My interests have also expanded out to more structural biology approaches, including the discovery and characterisation of single alpha helices (SAH) domains in proteins and most recently my laboratory solved the structure of the shutdown state of myosin using Cryo-EM. I have trained over 40 postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers. I was the president of the Royal Microscopical Society (RMS) from 2016-2019 and am currently the Executive Honorary Secretary of the RMS. I am currently a Wellcome Trust Investigator, working on how the activity of motor proteins is regulated.

Pablo Rivera-Fuentes

University of Zurich, Switzerland

Pablo Rivera-Fuentes received a PhD in chemistry from ETH Zurich. After postdoctoral appointments at MIT and the University of Oxford, he started a small independent research group at ETH Zurich, followed by a short tenure-track assistant professorship at EPFL, before becoming Professor of Bioorganic Chemistry at the University of Zurich. His research interests span the development of small-molecule and protein-based tools for biological imaging, redox chemical biology, and single-molecule biophysics.

Marc Vendrell

University of Edinburgh, Scotland

His team has pioneered the design of smart chemical fluorophores for high-resolution optical imaging (>150 papers) and built an ambitious research programme linking physical and biomedical sciences through competitive funding -over £11M as PI (>£40M as co-I), including prestigious European ERC Consolidator and EIC Transition grants-. Vendrell is co-inventor of 13 patents, PI for 9 licensed technologies and collaborative projects with industry and Pharma, and he has contributed to founding two spin-out companies on therapeutics (InPepcide) and diagnostics (IDxSense). Vendrell has a strong record of mentoring and training the next generation of translational scientists, with several alumni holding independent positions in academia and industry. He has won some awards and distinctions, the latest being the Bader Prize for eminence in Organic Chemistry by The Royal Society of Chemistry in 2023 and elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Scottish national academy, in 2024. Vendrell currently heads the IRR Chemistry Hub at the College of Medicine in Edinburgh as one of the first global hubs for collaborative non-siloed chemical research to catalyse innovation in biomedical sciences and accelerate translational outputs.