Honours for mmc2014 Plenary Speakers
The Microscience Microscopy Congress 2014 (mmc2014) will open in Manchester on Monday 30 th June. A hugely impressive line-up of Plenary Speakers has been confirmed, and in recognition of their work, each will receive Honorary Fellowships during the event. This is the Society’s highest award and it is very rare for so many to be made in a single year. However, 2014 is a special year as it is the Society’s 175 th Anniversary.
Extracts from the award citations remind us of the invaluable contributions that these speakers have made to microscopy -
Professor Flemming Bessenbacher , Aarhus University, Denmark
“Professor Bassenbacher has had an extraordinarily distinguished career in Scanning Probe Microscopy and in developing microscopy tools for the nanoscale characterization of materials. He was one of the pioneers of Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy in the late 1980s, developing a home-built instrument that was revolutionary in providing some of the very first images of metal surfaces at atomic resolution and at highly elevated temperatures. The stability of the instrument and the images acquired made it possible to record movies of surface processes for the first time.”
Professor Mildred Dresselhaus , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
“Professor Dresselhaus and her group have extensively employed advanced electron microscopy and Raman micro spectroscopy to nanomaterials, in particular carbon nanostructures to relate their structure to their electronic properties. As such she has defined some of the basic concepts of using well-defined nanostructures in electronic devices to achieve a specific functional behavior which is key for their use in technological applications.”
Dr Ondrej Krivanek , President, Nion Co and Adjunct Professor, Arizona State University, USA
“In 1997 Dr Krivanek founded Nion Co, that designed and built the first correctors for spherical aberration for the scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) configuration that showed an improvement over the uncorrected performance. This development is undoubtedly the most important improvement in STEM since its initial invention. Many of the experimental "firsts" that aberration correction has allowed have been achieved using Nion instrumentation.”
Dr Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz , National Institutes of Health, USA
“Dr Lippincott-Schwartz and her postdoctoral fellow George Patterson developed photoactivatable GFP, enabling activation of fluorescence with a laser flash, and the newly fluorescent molecules could then be followed through cells. This development also led to ‘super-resolution imaging’, and the innovation of PALM (photoactivation localization microscopy). The recommendation for her award is made on the basis of her use of microscopy to understand organelle dynamics and inheritance strategies, leading the field in this area, her leadership in the use of GFP in live cell imaging, and her pioneering work in the development of photoactivatable GFP, spurring on the new microscopical development of PALM.”
Professor Michael Sheetz , Columbia University, USA
“Professor Sheetz continues to work at the cutting edge of microscopy and biochemistry developing new tools and protocols for measuring forces at the molecular level in live cells, and recently he set-up the Institute for Mechanobiology in Singapore. Throughout his distinguished career he has developed and exploited the latest advances in microscopy to answer fundamental biological questions, and in the process he has produced an impressive body of scientific work.”
Professor Ernst Stelzer , Buchmann Institute for Molecular Life Sciences, Germany
“Professor Stelzer has been a key player in the development of confocal microscopy, and his academic patents were heavily utilised in the development of the highly successful Carl Zeiss LSM series. He was also involved with the development of 4Pi microscopy and other multi-lens detection schemes. These contributions have made a profound contribution to the world of microscopy, especially with regards to bioimaging. Beyond these significant inputs, Professor Stelzer also pioneered light sheet-based fluorescence microscopy (LSFM, SPIM, DSLM). With regards to ‘bio’ applications, this technique is still in its infancy and yet it is already enabling high impacting research as it becomes commercially available.”
All of the speakers were very happy to accept their invitations, and their responses can be summed up by Professor Stelzer. He said “The decision has taken me by surprise. I feel truly honoured and I am very pleased to accept.”
Professor Stelzer will give the 175 th Anniversary Lecture on the afternoon of Wednesday 2 nd July. This will be followed by the Congress Banquet at Lancashire Cricket Club, Old Trafford.