Follow-up event for Theo Murphy meeting 'Open, reproducible hardware for microscopy'

Dr Richard Bowman is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Reader at the University of Glasgow, specialising in optical instrumentation and laboratory automation. Over the last six years he has led the OpenFlexure Project, centred on open source designs for a laboratory microscope suitable for diagnostics, research, and teaching. It has been reproduced thousands of times by a diverse community in over 40 countries around the world, including research labs in many disciplines, pathology research and teaching, community groups looking at environmental samples, and companies using it as a basis for new products. He is a strong advocate of openness as a means to improve both the reproducibility and accessibility of modern scientific apparatus, and very much hopes this meeting helps to forge links between the microscopy and open hardware communities.

Dr Caroline Müllenbroich is a lecturer at the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. She studied physics at the University of Heidelberg, Germany and obtained her PhD at the Institute of Photonics, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow in 2012. She then joined the European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy (LENS) in Florence, Italy working on light-sheet microscopes for structural imaging of clarified mouse brains and functional imaging in Zebrafish. From 2016 on, she was a researcher with the Italian National Institute of Optics, National Research Council and focused her activities on the application of non-diffractive Bessel beams for the high-fidelity interrogation of neuronal structure and function. She obtained a Marie Curie Fellowship and a position at Glasgow University where her group now works on deep cardiac imaging, remote focusing and light-sheet microscopy. She is an advocate for increased inclusion and diversity in our the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths and Medicine) community. 

After doing an apprenticeship as an electrician Benedict Diederich started studying electrical engineering at the University for Applied Science Cologne. A specialisation in optics and an internship at Nikon Microscopy Japan pointed him to the interdisciplinary field of microscopy. After working for Zeiss he started his PhD in the Heintzmann Lab at the Leibniz IPHT Jena, where he focusses on bringing cutting edge research to everybody by relying on tailored image processing and low-cost optical setups. Part of his PhD program took place at the Photonics Center at the Boston University in the Tian Lab. A recent contribution was the open-source optical toolbox UC2 (You-See-Too) which tries to democratise science by making cutting-edge affordable and available to everyone, everywhere.

Dr Julieta Arancio is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Science, Technology and Society, Drexel University (USA), and an associated researcher at CENIT-UNSAM (Argentina). She holds a degree in environmental science from Universidad de Buenos Aires and a PhD in science and technology studies from Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Julieta has followed the open science hardware movement since 2017, looking at its potential contributions to more equitable science. Her current work, funded by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, explores how open hardware is enabling new research activities and agendas. She has written academic papers and policy briefs on the topic, having presented her research at venues such as University of Cambridge (UK) and MIT (US), and teaching seminars at Universidad Nacional de Rosario (Argentina) and TU Berlin (Germany). Beyond academia, Julieta co-founded the Open Science Hardware network in Latin America (reGOSH) and the mentorship program Open Hardware Makers.

Sanli Faez is a professor (UD) at the Physics department of Utrecht University, a member of KNAW De Jonge Akademie, and a fellow at the Centre for Unusual Collaborations. He studied Physics at the Sharif University of Technology in Iran, and received his master’s degree in Nanotechnology from the University of Twente. His doctorate research at the University of Amsterdam was on wave propagation in strongly scattering media and Anderson localization. After post-doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and Leiden Institute of Physics, focused on single-molecule optics and (cryogenic) microscopy, he became the principal investigator for the research direction nanoElectroPhotonics at the Nanophotonics section of the Debye Institute for Nanomaterials at Utrecht University. He has hosted and produced several podcasts about open science.

Gail McConnell is Professor of Biophotonics at the Strathclyde Institute for Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. Following a first degree in Laser Physics and Optoelectronics (1998) and PhD in Physics from the University of Strathclyde (2002), she obtained a Personal Research Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2003) and a Research Councils UK Academic Fellowship (2005), securing a Readership in 2008 and Professorship in 2012. The work in Gail’s group involves the design, development and applications of linear and nonlinear optical instrumentation for biological and medical imaging, from the nanoscale to the whole organism. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society, where she is the current Chair of the Light Microscopy Committee.