Light Microscopy

Kurt Anderson

Light Microscopy Section Chair, The Francis Crick Institute

Kurt is a cell biologist who uses advanced imaging methods to study cell migration. He completed his PhD at the University of Salzburg in 1997 on the actin-based mechanism of fish keratocyte migration. He then spent 2 years as a post-doc at the Marie Curie Cancer Research Institute (UK) before moving to Dresden in 2001 to set up the light microscopy facility at the new MPI-CBG. In 2005 he moved to the Beatson Institute for Cancer Research in Glasgow, where he runs the Beatson Advanced Imaging Resource (BAIR) and a research group investigating tumor cell migration. His work at the Beatson used imaging methods such as FRAP and FRET to study the molecular dynamics of cell adhesion and migration in vitro and in vivo. In 2016 Kurt moved to the Francis Crick Institute, where he is now Head of the Crick Advanced Light Microscopy Facility (CALM)

Jessica Valli

Light Microscopy Section Deputy Chair, Heriot-Watt University

Jessica is the Facility Manager for the Edinburgh Super-Resolution Imaging Consortium (ESRIC) and is based at the Heriot-Watt University site. Jessica completed her PhD at the University of Oxford in 2017 where she used a wide range of advanced imaging techniques to study parasite-host interactions. Jessica now works in an interdisciplinary environment, running the imaging facility at the Institute of Biological Chemistry, Bioengineering and Biophysics at Heriot-Watt University. 

Richard Bowman

University of Glasgow

Richard is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Reader at the University of Glasgow, whose research interests focus on instrumentation development for automated microscopy.  Over the last six years he has led the OpenFlexure project, which uses open source hardware as a means to make automated laboratory experiments more repeatable and more accessible.  This includes extensive collaboration with engineering and clinical collaborators in Tanzania, with the aim of enabling local engineers to manufacture digital microscopes suitable for medical diagnostics.  He obtained his PhD in 2012 from the University of Glasgow working on optical micromanipulation, then spent four years in Cambridge working on microspectroscopic characterisation of single nanostructures before moving to Bath. He moved to the University of Glasgow in 2022.

Viji Draviam

Queen Mary University of London

Viji M. Draviam is a Professor in Quantitative Cell and Molecular Biology at the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London and a Turing Research Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. Her research interest is in the area of cell division and force generation, with a focus on the molecular basis for pathologies associated with cell division defects. To translate her group's research findings, Viji develops computational, molecular and optoelectronic tools with industry partners worldwide, Zeiss, Exscientia, MSD and Heptares. Viji leads the Center for Cell Dynamics, co-leads the AI for Drug Discovery UKRI/BBSRC-CTP and chairs the Research & Training Committee for BBSRC's flagship LIDo-DTP program. 
She started her independent research as a Cancer Research UK Career Development Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a Senior Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. Draviam received a PhD from Trinity College, University of Cambridge and an MSc from the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore. Her post-doctoral work was with Peter Sorger at the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School and MIT, while her PhD work was with Jon Pines at the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge. She is a Nehru Scholar and fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust. She is the cofounder of CellCentives, an international clinical initiative to help eradicate Tuberculosis and a co-mentor of ENERGISE campaign that promotes STEM education among women students

Joëlle Goulding

University of Nottingham

Joëlle is a research fellow in advanced microscopy at the University of Nottingham within the Centre of Membrane Proteins and Receptors (COMPARE). COMPARE is a unique collaboration between the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham. Following a PhD in Genetics at the University of Nottingham, she moved into the field of G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) pharmacology within the group of Professor Stephen Hill specialising in the development of imaging technologies to study the pharmacology of Class A GPCRs utilising fluorescent ligands and bioluminescent fusion proteins. This work has harboured an interest in studying endogenous receptor function and translating techniques for use within stem cell derived model systems. In 2017 Joëlle joined COMPARE and is working on the development of Fluorescent Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS) methodologies alongside Bioluminescence Resonance Energy Transfer (BRET) imaging for GPCRs and tyrosine kinases.

Tim Hawkins

Durham University

Tim is a cell biologist and Head of Bioimaging at Durham University. He completed his PhD at Durham University in 2003 in Plant Molecular Cell Biology studying microtubule associated proteins such as MOR1/GEM1, their role in cytokinesis and their relationship with catastrophic kinesins. He continued his Post-Doc career in the plant cytoskeleton including work on the NETWORKED family of actin:membrane linking proteins and their role in plant pathogen responses. In 2010 he became a facility manager and set up the light microscopy facility in the Department of Biosciences. The facilities have continued to grow with technology and staff and he became Head of Bioimaging in 2024. He is also deputy director of the Durham Centre of Bioimaging Technology. His research group develop new light microscopy technology and methodologies, such as ExM for plant cells and undertake a wide variety of translational research in collaboration with industry partners, developing imaging approaches to study live collagen dynamics and organisation, melanosome transfer and the cell mechanics of aged cells. He is passionate about bioimaging teaching, training and public engagement, leading undergraduate bioimaging modules, postgraduate courses and developing e-learning bioimaging CPD. He is a keen advocate of technical careers and a member the ITSS strategic technical leaders network.
 

Krishna Inavalli

University of Southampton

Dr Krishna Inavalli obtained a PhD in Physics, where he developed a new method to generate structured light beams. During his first postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, he developed novel microscopy techniques to image biological tissues and nano structures. In his second postdoctoral position at Interdisciplinary Institute for Neurosciences, Bordeaux, he combined STED with SMLM techniques in a single microscope to reveal morphological and molecular information of neuronal synapses. He contributed to the development of a new super-resolution microscopy technique ‘SUSHI’ to probe brain extracellular space. He also developed adaptive optics 3D_STED to investigate interactions between synaptic partners. Currently, Dr Inavalli is working as the Head of Microscopy at the Centre for Cancer Immunology, University of Southampton where he continues developing cutting edge technologies and applying them to the analysis of antibody-based cancer therapeutics.

Claire Mitchell

Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute

Claire is a Principal Scientific Officer working in the Beatson Advanced Imaging Resource imaging facility, part of the Cancer Research UK Scotland Institute in Glasgow. Claire completed her PhD in Biophotonics in St Andrews, focussed on using ultrafast lasers for cellular manipulation. She then worked on building multiphoton microscopes before moving into a core facility role. Over the last decade, Claire has gained expertise in nearly every type of light microscopy technique but specialises in multiphoton and light sheet. She is also passionate about light microscopy education and reproducibility to improve the quality of microscopy-based research.

Chris Mulcahy

Abberior Instruments GmbH

Chris is the Head of Sales for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at Abberior Instruments GmbH, a company known for pioneering superresolution STED and MINFLUX microscopy technology.

He has over 20 years of experience in the microscopy and semiconductor industries, combining a solid scientific background with commercial expertise. Chris completed his PhD in surface chemistry at Imperial College, London, publishing numerous articles involving a variety of microscopy techniques. His career includes senior sales roles at Oxford Instruments, JPK Instruments, and Eurofins, where he led teams to deliver advanced microscopy solutions and fostered collaborations with academic and industry partners.

Caroline Mullenbroich

University of Glasgow

Caroline is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow whose research interests focus on structural and functional imaging in the heart. Caroline is motivated by two grant challenges; to image transmurally through the thick muscular wall of the ventricle and to correlate functional and structural data from the same tissue to obtain causal relationships. Over the past six years she has lead research projects addressing these challenges including mesoscopic imaging of tissue structure in cleared hearts with light-sheet microscopy and functional imaging with innovative multiphoton and fluorescence lifetime imaging techniques. Caroline obtained her PhD from the University of Strathclyde working on adaptive optics and then spent 5 years in Florence, Italy focusing on neurophotonics, optogenetics and non-diffractive beams. She joined the University of Glasgow in 2018 where she leads a team on cardiophotonics. Caroline is passionate about increasing diversity and inclusion in STEM, most recently as PI on a CDT that is aimed at providing access to doctoral training to a wider, more diverse talent pool, traditionally under-represented in STEM.

Sebastian Munck

VIB Bio Imaging Core KU Leuven

Sebastian started his career in Munich, where he studied Biology and later obtained a Ph.D at the BioImaging Center of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University. Later he worked as a Product Manager for Till Photonics, in Germany, between 2003 and 2004. After that he moved to Innsbruck as a Postdoc at the Medical University, from 2004 to 2006. He became Staff Scientist at the VIB in 2007 and in 2013 consequently independent group leader as Expert Technologist. In this function he also established the Leuven part of the VIB Bio Imaging Core and the Departmental imaging facility at the Center for Brain and Disease research. Sebastian  was appointed Assistant Professor (part-time) at Faculty of Medicine KU Leuven in 2015. 

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.
 

Michael Schwertner

Linkam Scientific Instruments Ltd

Michael has a background in physics and optics and a particular interest in microscopy, instrument design and image processing. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, Dept. of Engineering Science, where he worked on confocal microscopy, adaptive optics and wavefront sensing. 

At Linkam he has been involved with Cryo-correlative fluorescence / EM imaging (CLEM), cryo workflows and the design of some aspects of the related instruments. He has contributed to cryo-related workshops and courses in the past - including EMBO and Rothamsted Research Cryo Course.

Tim Young

Early Career Representative , University of Cambridge

I qualified as a Biomedical Scientist in 2012 after completing my bachelor’s degree at The University of Essex but never entered practise. Instead I moved towards research; my first job was a technician with the MRC Epidemiology Unit, here I used a variety of methods to perform batch analysis of large cohorts of samples.
After this I moved towards cancer research and worked as a research assistant for Prof. Bruce Ponder in conjunction with the NHS Papworth Histology team. The research was directed towards the investigation of DNA repair dysfunction which can cause a genetic predisposition to lung cancer, particularly in smokers.
Then, in 2016, I joined the lab of Christian Frezza at Uni. Of Cambridge as part of the mass spectrometry team before becoming the lab manager and microscopist. When the lab moved out of the country I joined Prof. Paul Lehner’s team in CITIID and am continuing my RMS diploma here.