SIMposium: recent advancements in structured illumination microscopy

Professor Rainer Heintzmann studied at the Universities of Osnabrück and Heidelberg and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute of biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and as a group at the Randall Division, King’s College London. He is currently professor of physical chemistry at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, and heads the microscopy research unit at the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology in Jena, Germany. His research focuses on methods for imaging cellular function at high resolution and developing techniques to measure multidimensional information in small biological objects such as cells, cellular organelles or other small structures of interest. Examples of his developments are structured illumination, image inversion interferometry, optical photon reassignment, and pointillism. He is highly interested is in computer-based reconstruction and inverse modelling methods such as deconvolution. 

James is a physicist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where he works on developing new optical microscopy techniques for the study of biological samples. He has a particular interest in structured illumination and light sheet fluorescence microscopy, with a view towards rapid live imaging.

Lothar Schermelleh has studied Biology at the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (LMU). He obtained his doctorate under the supervision of Thomas Cremer in 2003 for his work on the 'Dynamic organisation of chromosomes in the mammalian cell nucleus'. He later joined the group of Heinrich Leonhardt as a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer, where he studied the role and regulation of DNA methylation 1 through developing and applying advanced single-cell imaging and analyses approaches. During this time, as a visiting scientist in the lab of John Sedat at the UCSF, he first came in contact with super-resolution structured illumination microscopy (SIM), and he later established this technique and its cell biological application at the LMU Munich. In 2011, Lothar joined the University of Oxford as Micron Senior Research Fellow and Principal Investigator at the Department of Biochemistry, where his group further advanced the development of quantitative super-resolution 3D imaging to study mesoscale chromatin organisation and mechanisms of epigenetic gene regulation, eg in X chromosome inactivation. In 2020, he was named Associate Professor and became Academic Director of the Micron Bioimaging Facility.   

Colin Sheppard obtained his PhD in Engineering from University of Cambridge (1973), and DSc degree in Physical Sciences from University of Oxford (1986). Professor Sheppard is currently Honorary Professorial Fellow at University of Wollongong, Australia; External Collaborator and Visiting Scientist with Italian Institute of Technology, Genoa; and Supernumerary Fellow of Pembroke College Oxford. He was Lecturer in Engineering at University of Oxford, and Fellow of Pembroke College; Professor of Physics and Head of Physical Optics Department at University of Sydney, Australia; Professor and Head of Department of Bioengineering at the National University of Singapore; and Senior Scientist at Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa. He was elected Fellow of OSA, SPIE, IEE, Institute of Physics, Japan Society for Applied Physics, and Royal Microscopical Society. He was Vice-President of International Commission for Optics, and President of International Society for Optics Within Life Sciences (OWLS). He received Italian Society for Optics and Photonics Galileo Galilei Medal, Institute of Physics Optics and Photonics Division Prize, Max Planck Bonhöffer Medal, Humboldt Research Award, ISATA Mercedes Award, National Physical Laboratory Metrology Award, Prince of Wales Award for Industrial Innovation, British Technology Group Academic Enterprise Award, and IEE Gyr and Landis Prize.

Liangyi Chen is Boya Professor of Peking University. He obtained his undergraduate degrees Biomedical engineering in Xi’an JiaoTong University, then majored in Biomedical engineering in pursuing PhD degree in Huazhong University of Science and Technology. His lab focused on two interweaved aspects: the development of new imaging and quantitative image analysis algorithms, and the application of these technology to study how glucose-stimulated insulin secretion is regulated in the health and disease at multiple levels (single cells, islets and in vivo) in the health and disease animal models. The techniques developed included ultrasensitive Hessian structured illumination microscopy (Hessian SIM) for live cell super-resolution imaging, the Sparse deconvolution algorithm for extending spatial resolution of fluorescence microscopes limited by the optics, Super-resolution fluorescence-assisted diffraction computational tomography (SR-FACT) for revealing the three-dimensional landscape of the cellular organelle interactome, two-photon three-axis digital scanned lightsheet microscopy (2P3A-DSLM) for tissue and small organism imaging, and fast High-resolution Miniature Two-photon Microscopy (FHIRM-TPM) for Brain Imaging in Freely-behaving Mice. He is also recipient of the National Distinguish Scholar Fund project from National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Professor Rainer Heintzmann studied at the Universities of Osnabrück and Heidelberg and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute of biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and as a group at the Randall Division, King’s College London. He is currently professor of physical chemistry at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, and heads the microscopy research unit at the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology in Jena, Germany. His research focuses on methods for imaging cellular function at high resolution and developing techniques to measure multidimensional information in small biological objects such as cells, cellular organelles or other small structures of interest. Examples of his developments are structured illumination, image inversion interferometry, optical photon reassignment, and pointillism. He is highly interested is in computer-based reconstruction and inverse modelling methods such as deconvolution. 

James is a physicist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where he works on developing new optical microscopy techniques for the study of biological samples. He has a particular interest in structured illumination and light sheet fluorescence microscopy, with a view towards rapid live imaging.

Marcel Müller works on implementing microscope systems and data reconstruction algorithms for structured illumination microscopy (SIM). In 2016, he started the fairSIM project, which aims to provide SIM-related resources (software plugins, example datasets, system blueprints) to the scientific community. He has since worked at the Micron Advanced Imaging Facility at the University of Oxford, as a MSCA fellow at the KU Leuven, and is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Bielefeld University in Germany. His research focused on new, robust, fast and cost-effective implementations of structured illumination microscopy.

Trained as a mechanical engineer in computational fluid dynamics, Reto Fiolka completed his PhD at the institute of Nanotechnology at ETH Zurich in the group of Dr Andreas Stemmer. He conducted post-doctoral research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus under the late Dr Mats Gustafsson working on 3D structured illumination microscopy and under Dr Meng Cui on adaptive optics. At UT Southwestern, the research in his lab aims to extend the current imaging capabilities of optical microscopy such that cancer cell research and drug screening can be performed in physiologically relevant, 3D environments, ex vivo and in vivo. His microscope development is focused on improving the spatiotemporal resolution and optical penetration depth and translating new technologies to biological research.

Colin Sheppard obtained his PhD in Engineering from University of Cambridge (1973), and DSc degree in Physical Sciences from University of Oxford (1986). Professor Sheppard is currently Honorary Professorial Fellow at University of Wollongong, Australia; External Collaborator and Visiting Scientist with Italian Institute of Technology, Genoa; and Supernumerary Fellow of Pembroke College Oxford. He was Lecturer in Engineering at University of Oxford, and Fellow of Pembroke College; Professor of Physics and Head of Physical Optics Department at University of Sydney, Australia; Professor and Head of Department of Bioengineering at the National University of Singapore; and Senior Scientist at Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa. He was elected Fellow of OSA, SPIE, IEE, Institute of Physics, Japan Society for Applied Physics, and Royal Microscopical Society. He was Vice-President of International Commission for Optics, and President of International Society for Optics Within Life Sciences (OWLS). He received Italian Society for Optics and Photonics Galileo Galilei Medal, Institute of Physics Optics and Photonics Division Prize, Max Planck Bonhöffer Medal, Humboldt Research Award, ISATA Mercedes Award, National Physical Laboratory Metrology Award, Prince of Wales Award for Industrial Innovation, British Technology Group Academic Enterprise Award, and IEE Gyr and Landis Prize.

Sara Abrahamsson is an Assistant Professor at UCSC pursuing groundbreaking research in optical systems design and diffractive optics for 3D microscopy and super-resolution microscopy. She has developed the imaging methods aberration-corrected Multifocus Microscopy and MultiFocus Structured Illumination Microscopy which enable live simultaneous 3D imaging at and beyond the diffraction limit of resolution.

Trained as a mechanical engineer in computational fluid dynamics, Reto Fiolka completed his PhD at the institute of Nanotechnology at ETH Zurich in the group of Dr Andreas Stemmer. He conducted post-doctoral research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus under the late Dr Mats Gustafsson working on 3D structured illumination microscopy and under Dr Meng Cui on adaptive optics. At UT Southwestern, the research in his lab aims to extend the current imaging capabilities of optical microscopy such that cancer cell research and drug screening can be performed in physiologically relevant, 3D environments, ex vivo and in vivo. His microscope development is focused on improving the spatiotemporal resolution and optical penetration depth and translating new technologies to biological research.

Professor Thomas Huser is a professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. He has been a university professor for more than 15 years and a scientific group leader for the last 20 years. Professor Huser started his scientific career as a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, where he became scientific capability leader for Nano-Biophotonics and became an Associated Professor at the University of California, Davis, in 2005, where he also acted as Chief Scientist for the NSF Center for Biophotonics. From 2009 - 2011 he was also a guest professor at the University of Tromsø in Norway. His research interests are ultrasensitive optical microscopy and spectroscopy at the level of single cells and single molecules, applied to biomedical problems with high relevance for human health. 

Dr Dong Li is Principal Investigator at Institute of Biophysics. He received his PhD in electronic and computer engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2011. Then he spent four years for postdoctoral research of developing super-resolution microscopy at Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute. After that he joined Institute of Biophysics. Dr Dong Li’s group focuses on developing super-resolution microscopy (SIM) for high-speed and long-term live imaging, and exploring their applications in biological research. Recently, Dong has made advances in patterned activation nonlinear SIM (PA NL-SIM) that breaks the 100 nm resolution barrier of conventional SIM for live-cell imaging; grazing incidence SIM (GI-SIM) that optimizes the 2D illumination depth while suppressing out-of-focus background; deep Fourier channel attention network SIM (DFCAN-SIM) that achieved robust SIM reconstruction at the challenging imaging conditions. These techniques enable interrogate the dynamics of biological processes in live status at ultrahigh resolution in space and time.

Sara Abrahamsson is an Assistant Professor at UCSC pursuing groundbreaking research in optical systems design and diffractive optics for 3D microscopy and super-resolution microscopy. She has developed the imaging methods aberration-corrected Multifocus Microscopy and MultiFocus Structured Illumination Microscopy which enable live simultaneous 3D imaging at and beyond the diffraction limit of resolution.

Eduardo Hirata is a PhD candidate in the SaraLab and is in the final stages of launching his 25-camera Multifocus Microscope (M25) which is employed in high-speed functional neuronal imaging.

Marcel Müller works on implementing microscope systems and data reconstruction algorithms for structured illumination microscopy (SIM). In 2016, he started the fairSIM project, which aims to provide SIM-related resources (software plugins, example datasets, system blueprints) to the scientific community. He has since worked at the Micron Advanced Imaging Facility at the University of Oxford, as a MSCA fellow at the KU Leuven, and is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Bielefeld University in Germany. His research focused on new, robust, fast and cost-effective implementations of structured illumination microscopy.

Hai Gong received the BS degree in Mechatronic Engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2007, the MS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University in 2011, and the PhD degree in optics and control engineering from Delft University of Technology in 2019. He is currently working as a postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Physics at Imperial College London. His research interests include structured illumination microscopy, light-sheet microscopy, wavefront sensing and adaptive optics. In 2017, he received the silver Edmund Optics educational award.

Mike joined the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) after completing an undergraduate degree in physics at Imperial College London. He completed his PhD studies, also with Imperial College, on overcoming resolution limits in fluorescence microscopy using adaptive optics and structured illumination whilst working at NPL. Mike is currently a Principal Research Scientist in NPL’s Biometrology group where his work focuses on the development and application of high-resolution fluorescence microscopy techniques for multiscale biological imaging, particularly structured illumination and light sheet methods. He is also a Principal Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, where he leads a multidisciplinary team based in the UCL TouchLab exploring label free computational imaging, image analysis and manipulation techniques for diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

Craig is a Computational Microscopist who develops software and algorithms for addressing microscopy related challenges. During his PhD he built a light-sheet microscope for developmental biology; he then spent some time at NPL working, developing SIM and airy-light-sheet systems for BioMetrology; and he now works as a Data Scientist at the EMBL-EBI using machine learning for analysing biological images.

Lothar Schermelleh has studied Biology at the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (LMU). He obtained his doctorate under the supervision of Thomas Cremer in 2003 for his work on the 'Dynamic organisation of chromosomes in the mammalian cell nucleus'. He later joined the group of Heinrich Leonhardt as a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer, where he studied the role and regulation of DNA methylation 1 through developing and applying advanced single-cell imaging and analyses approaches. During this time, as a visiting scientist in the lab of John Sedat at the UCSF, he first came in contact with super-resolution structured illumination microscopy (SIM), and he later established this technique and its cell biological application at the LMU Munich. In 2011, Lothar joined the University of Oxford as Micron Senior Research Fellow and Principal Investigator at the Department of Biochemistry, where his group further advanced the development of quantitative super-resolution 3D imaging to study mesoscale chromatin organisation and mechanisms of epigenetic gene regulation, eg in X chromosome inactivation. In 2020, he was named Associate Professor and became Academic Director of the Micron Bioimaging Facility.   

Professor Thomas Huser is a professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. He has been a university professor for more than 15 years and a scientific group leader for the last 20 years. Professor Huser started his scientific career as a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, where he became scientific capability leader for Nano-Biophotonics and became an Associated Professor at the University of California, Davis, in 2005, where he also acted as Chief Scientist for the NSF Center for Biophotonics. From 2009 - 2011 he was also a guest professor at the University of Tromsø in Norway. His research interests are ultrasensitive optical microscopy and spectroscopy at the level of single cells and single molecules, applied to biomedical problems with high relevance for human health. 

Liangyi Chen is Boya Professor of Peking University. He obtained his undergraduate degrees Biomedical engineering in Xi’an JiaoTong University, then majored in Biomedical engineering in pursuing PhD degree in Huazhong University of Science and Technology. His lab focused on two interweaved aspects: the development of new imaging and quantitative image analysis algorithms, and the application of these technology to study how glucose-stimulated insulin secretion is regulated in the health and disease at multiple levels (single cells, islets and in vivo) in the health and disease animal models. The techniques developed included ultrasensitive Hessian structured illumination microscopy (Hessian SIM) for live cell super-resolution imaging, the Sparse deconvolution algorithm for extending spatial resolution of fluorescence microscopes limited by the optics, Super-resolution fluorescence-assisted diffraction computational tomography (SR-FACT) for revealing the three-dimensional landscape of the cellular organelle interactome, two-photon three-axis digital scanned lightsheet microscopy (2P3A-DSLM) for tissue and small organism imaging, and fast High-resolution Miniature Two-photon Microscopy (FHIRM-TPM) for Brain Imaging in Freely-behaving Mice. He is also recipient of the National Distinguish Scholar Fund project from National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Mike joined the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) after completing an undergraduate degree in physics at Imperial College London. He completed his PhD studies, also with Imperial College, on overcoming resolution limits in fluorescence microscopy using adaptive optics and structured illumination whilst working at NPL. Mike is currently a Principal Research Scientist in NPL’s Biometrology group where his work focuses on the development and application of high-resolution fluorescence microscopy techniques for multiscale biological imaging, particularly structured illumination and light sheet methods. He is also a Principal Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, where he leads a multidisciplinary team based in the UCL TouchLab exploring label free computational imaging, image analysis and manipulation techniques for diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

Dr Dong Li is Principal Investigator at Institute of Biophysics. He received his PhD in electronic and computer engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2011. Then he spent four years for postdoctoral research of developing super-resolution microscopy at Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute. After that he joined Institute of Biophysics. Dr Dong Li’s group focuses on developing super-resolution microscopy (SIM) for high-speed and long-term live imaging, and exploring their applications in biological research. Recently, Dong has made advances in patterned activation nonlinear SIM (PA NL-SIM) that breaks the 100 nm resolution barrier of conventional SIM for live-cell imaging; grazing incidence SIM (GI-SIM) that optimizes the 2D illumination depth while suppressing out-of-focus background; deep Fourier channel attention network SIM (DFCAN-SIM) that achieved robust SIM reconstruction at the challenging imaging conditions. These techniques enable interrogate the dynamics of biological processes in live status at ultrahigh resolution in space and time.

Dr Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz is a Senior Group Leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus. She has pioneered the use of green fluorescent protein technology for quantitative analysis and modelling of intracellular protein traffic and organelle dynamics in live cells. Her innovative techniques to label, image, quantify and model specific live cell protein populations and track their fate have provided vital tools used throughout the research community. Her own findings using these techniques have reshaped thinking about the biogenesis, function, targeting, and maintenance of various subcellular organelles and macromolecular complexes and their crosstalk with regulators of the cell cycle, metabolism, aging, and cell fate determination. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society of Arts and Sciences and the European Molecular Biology Organization. She is also a Fellow of The Biophysical Society, The Royal Microscopical Society and The American Society of Cell Biology. Her awards include the E.B. Wilson Medal of the American Society of Cell Biology, the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Van Deenen Medal, the Keith Porter Award of the American Society of Cell Biology, the Feodor Lynen Medal, and the Feulgen Prize of the Society of Histochemistry. She co-authored of the textbook Cell Biology and was President of the American Society of Cell Biology. Dr Lippincott-Schwartz attended Swarthmore College, received her MS from Stanford University, and obtained her PhD in Biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University in 1986.