Ask the Experts

My name is Alec De Grand and I’m a product manager for virtual slide scanning and upright microscopes at Olympus. I’ve been at Olympus for over 10 years, managing clinical products, marketing initiatives, imaging courses and trade shows

Bülent Peker is an expert on laser scanning microscopy. He first developed an interest in microscopy and photonics during his PhD in physical chemistry, where he worked on time-resolved two-photon microscopy, and this passion has been with him ever since. Bülent has been with Evident for over 16 years and has helped the team introduce leading-edge laser scanning microscopes. He’s particularly fascinated by the applications of multiphoton systems and the customization possibilities of laser scanning systems.

Chunsong is the business development manager for life science at Olympus Australia and New Zealand. He is currently responsible for confocal, multiphoton, light sheet, and slide scanning systems. He joined Olympus in 2003, working in various roles, always trying to offer the best Olympus solution to our customers.

My name is Daniel Bemmerl and I’m here to help you with anything related to 3D high-content analysis and organoid imaging. I joined Olympus as an application specialist for TIRF microscopy and high-content screening and now specialize in 3D analysis software.

I studied molecular and developmental stem cell biology and quickly realized that I was more interested in the more technical aspects of research and especially in imaging itself than in the specimens I was imaging. I came to Olympus Life Science because I liked the idea of working outside of the lab and as an interface between customer and development. I'd be happy to answer any of your questions on 3D imaging and help you improve your imaging workflow to focus on your research.

Hello. I’m Dr. Nicolas Bourg, chief technical officer (CTO) and co-founder of Abbelight and I’m your designated expert for single molecule localization microscopy (SMLM) – as known as nanoscopy – which includes techniques like PALM, dSTORM, SPT-PALM and DNA-PAINT.

I’m an optronic engineer by training, and I did a Ph.D. in biophotonics at the Paris-Saclay University, working on a unique 3D nanoscopy technique with unprecedented resolution. With my research team, we decided to share all the knowledge I acquired during my PhD and we created Abbelight: a startup that aims to make nanoscopy even more powerful and fully accessible to any biologist without advanced microscopy training. My job is to answer all your questions about nanoscopy, so please get in touch.

Hi, my name is Flavio Giacobone and I am responsible for slide scanning solutions across the Olympus Europa markets. Imaging has always been in my blood, starting from my degree in biomedical engineering, and joining Olympus has allowed me to experience first-hand the shift to digital, which has been happening in many clinical and research fields. I built my expertise in whole slide imaging starting from Olympus’ first scanner, the dotSlide, so I have witnessed with my own eyes how much progress has been made since that first product.

Hello! I am Ganesh Kadasoor, and I have worked with Olympus high-end imaging in India for the past 15 years. I have Bachelor and Master’s degrees in Life Sciences and secured my Ph.D. in Medical Entomology from the University of Mysore, India. I joined Olympus as a confocal specialist, taking care of all high-end imaging systems including live cell imaging, laser scanning confocal, TIRF, spinning disk confocal, super resolution, and multiphoton microscopes. I’m currently the National Manager (Applications Support) at Olympus Medical Systems India Ltd, Bangalore, and am involved in conducting training programs for scientists, academics, and the distributor network across the country. I am also responsible for organizing various microscopy and imaging workshops, seminars, and webinars as well as support both national and international microscopy courses as tutor/trainer in India.

As a biologist with a focus on neuronal development of insects and the structure of sialic acid binding neuronal proteins in mammals, Heiko Gaethje gained first experience with widefield and confocal fluorescence microscopy and image processing of 3D data.

Heiko joined Olympus in 2004 as a web content manager in the Marketing and Communication team. Since 2008, he has worked as a microscopy trainer at the Olympus Academy and is responsible for the conception and introduction of digital learning tools. In addition, he supports and conducts microscopy training courses at the EMBL Heidelberg and the Zurich Winter School on Advanced Microscopy where he regularly answers questions related to image processing and image analysis.

Hello. I’m Irina Rakotoson and I’m the Life Science Product Manager for PhaseView. I obtained my master's degree in Cell Biology, Physiology and Pathology specialized in aging at Paris Descartes University. Before joining PhaseView as Product Manager, I worked in a Neuroscience research lab (SPPIN), optimizing clearing protocols for the microscopy core facility.

Hi, my name is Junsung Kim and product specialist of confocal microscope in Olympus Korea. I have a master’s degree in bioengineering from Korea University. I joined Olympus in 2014 and providing application support for customers with Olympus confocal and multi-photon microscopes.

I’m Kathy Lindsley and I’m an application specialist at Olympus, supporting camera-based imaging systems. I have a B.Sc. in biochemistry from Iowa State University. I joined Olympus in 2006 as a research imaging sales representative and in 2012 I transitioned to the life science applications group. Prior to joining Olympus, I worked as a research assistant in academic research for 15 years, gaining experience in patch clamp, calcium imaging, tissue culture and immunohistochemistry.

Hello. I’m Lauren Alvarenga and I work as a product manager for research imaging at Olympus where I’m currently responsible for imaging software and inverted and super-resolution microscopes. I have a B.Sc. in biomedical photographic communications from the Rochester Institute of Technology. I’ve been with Olympus since 2015, supporting the FLUOVIEW product lines in the US, Canada and Latin America.

Manoel Veiga earned his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry in the University Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Following two postdocs in the Universities Complutense of Madrid and WWU Münster, he joined PicoQuant GmbH. After five years supporting customers worldwide in the fields of FLIM and time-resolved spectroscopy, he joined Olympus Soft Imaging Solutions GmbH in 2017, where he works as Global Application Specialist with a focus on high-content analysis and deep learning.

Hi, I am Minju Kim and product specialist of biological microscope in Olympus Korea. I joined Olympus in 2010 and working as highend sales and product specialist for the live cell and fluorescence imaging systems. Also, I am charged of the training programs for the distributors in South Korea.

Hello. My name is Rebecca Bonfig and I’m the product manager for confocal microscopy at Olympus. I completed my graduate work at the University of Louisville in the department of physiology and biophysics, studying the post-transcriptional regulation of the renal phosphate transporter Npt2a by parathyroid hormone. I’ve been with Olympus since 2015, supporting the FLUOVIEW product lines in the US, Canada and Latin America.

My name is Shohei Imamura. I’m a strategic project manager at Olympus. I have four years’ experience in scientific microscopy sales and seven years’ experience in product planning –especially software – and strategic project management and execution. I have a bachelor of commerce from Meiji University in Japan.

Hello! My name is Srivats Hariharan a.k.a Hari and I’m the product manager for Confocal, Multi-Photon and Super-Resolution microscopy at Olympus Singapore. I hold a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and have experience working in biomedical research labs and A*STAR Microscopy Core Facility where I supported researchers on confocal and live cell imaging technologies and help setup single molecule super-resolution and light sheet microscopy. 
I joined the life science team of Olympus Singapore in 2011 as Product Manager and in-charge of supporting research customers and business partners in South East Asia and Taiwan.

Stefan Marawske is an expert on super resolution microscopy. During his Ph.D. in the field of physical chemistry he created a home-built microscope for localization-based super resolution and particle tracking. He was fascinated by the fact that these methods are able to break the famous Abbe limit and can resolve structures that could not be identified before. He has been working with Olympus for more than 7 years and is responsible for high-end imaging systems, such as TIRF and spinning disc.

I’m Takeo Ogama, a senior product and strategy planner and product manager for microscope cameras at Olympus. I have eight years’ experience working in the research and development department on various products – including cameras – and eight years of product planning, marketing and management experience. Before joining Olympus, obtained my master’s degree in neutrino physics from Osaka University in Japan.

Wei Juan Wong has a degree in physics and has worked in a biophysical research laboratory as well as a microscopy core facility. She joined Olympus in 2018 as a Product Specialist at Olympus Singapore, where she supports Southeast Asia customers using widefield microscopes, including the VS200 slide scanner. In 2021, she moved to Germany to join Olympus Software Imaging Solutions as an Application Specialist, where she provides application and marketing support to customers worldwide.

Hello, I’m Klaus Willeke, Product Marketing Manager at Olympus Life Science Division and I’m responsible for our new X Line objectives. During my geology studies, the polarization microscope was an essential tool for determining and researching mineral compositions and structures. I was always fascinated by how colorful the world of minerals appears through a polarization microscope and how much you can discover with the help of light and good optics.

I’ve been working for Olympus for more than 22 years where I was 17 years a sales representative for industrial and life science microcopy in Germany and after that in European Product Marketing in the Scientific Solutions Division of Olympus, responsible for upright clinical and research microscopes and X Line lenses. 

Dr Hrishikesh Pai did his Fellowship in Reproductive Biology from the Royal Women’s Hospital, Melbourne Australia in 1989. He did his Masters in Clinical Embryology and Andrology from the Jones Institute, Eastern Virginia Medical School, USA in 2006. He has won 45 plus awards including the Honorary FRCOG from the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, United Kingdom in 2019. Dr Pai has been the Past President of the Indian Society for Assisted Reproduction (ISAR) and is the present Director of Corporate Affairs for International Federation of Fertility Societies (IFFS). Dr Pai is the President Elect of the Federation of Obstetric and Gynecological Societies of India (FOGSI) with a membership strength of 37,000 members. It is the second largest medical body of gynecologists in the world, only second to the ACOG.

Mr. Hiroya Ishihara is an Application Scientist at Olympus. He was studying the epigenetic factors involved in plant regeneration using omics and microscopy in Tokyo University of Science. Confocal and two-photon microscopy were his trusted partner at that time. Therefore, he joined Olympus to make life science more exciting with microscopes. Currently, he is working on a wide range of projects from basic research to product/sales strategy.

Dr. Gowri Balachander is a Research Fellow at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. She completed her PhD at the prestigious Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India where she worked on engineering 3D organotypic models for the study of breast cancer metastasis. At NUS, she currently works on morphogenetic models for human liver development and regeneration.

Joanna Hawryluk is a product manager for Olympus Corporation of the Americas located in Waltham, MA. She has been with Olympus since 2017 within the Marketing department specializing in our 3D cell analysis software, lightsheet microscopy, electrophysiology, and our cell culture monitoring system. Dr. Hawryluk received her doctorate degree in Physiology and Neurobiology in 2016 from the University of Connecticut.

Benjamin received his Ph.D. from the University of Bordeaux. During his Ph.D., in the group of Dr. Choquet at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Neuroscience, he studied the nanoscale organization of glutamate receptors at excitatory synapse and its importance for synaptic plasticity. In 2018, he joined the lab of Professor Burrone at King’s College London for his postdoc where he investigates the molecular organization of inhibitory synapses and its role in regulating neuronal firing, a project for which he obtained a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action postdoctoral fellowship.

Lin got his PhD back in 2010 in National University of Singapore working on biophysical research. From 2009 he joined Olympus as Technical and Application specialist taking care of laser based high end imaging system. In 2012, Lin decided to move back to China and taking a position with one of the leading scientific camera manufacturers Photometrics. There, he started as application specialist, later become regional sales manager and finally scientific sales manager for Asia Pacific. In 2021, Lin moved back to Singapore, joining Olympus Singapore as the manager for product and application. Lin has a long experience of various techniques on scientific digital imaging including various camera technologies.

Hello, my name is Angela Vasaturo, the senior field application scientist at Ultivue. My passion for micro-biology and live-cell imaging began during my post-doc, where I was involved in the early development of multiplex IHC in Europe.
I built my expertise through extensive involvement in post-doc research focused on tumor immunology at the NCMLS in Nijmegen, NL, as well as during my position as Senior Researcher in Dr. Jerome Galon’s Laboratory of Integrative Cancer Immunology at the Cordeliers Research Center.

My name is Shogo Usui and I'm product leader of CM20 at Olympus Corporation.

For over ten years, I have been an electrical engineer in the life science R&D team in Olympus Tokyo. I hold a Master’s degree in applied physics from the University of Electrical and Communication from Tokyo, Japan.

Dr. Anne Beghin is a multidisciplinary scientist with fifteen years of extensive research experience across academia and industry. She obtained her PhD in oncology in 2007 at the University Claude Bernard in Lyon (France). She then moved to optical microscopy at the Université de Lyon, where she established the microscopy platform and developed live cell imaging solutions and image analysis services for 4 years.

In 2011, she was recruited by a biotechnology company based in Bordeaux, where she spent 3 years in charge of a tissue analysis service: from biologic samples (whole tissue sections and Tissue Micro Arrays) to image acquisition and analysis with database establishment. She has been part of the Interdisciplinary Institute of NeuroScience IINS for 3 years where she successfully developed a new platform linking the High Content Screening (HCS) approach with super resolution microscopy such as Single Molecule Light Microscopy (HCS-SMLM), a collaboration with pharmaceutical company, Sanofi. Subsequently, she moved to the MechanoBiology Institute (MBI) in Singapore to study organoids using advanced imaging and HCS. This work has resulted in a patent and publications are on-going.

Dr. Xiaotong Cui received his B.S. and M.Sc. from the University of Leicester, UK. He went on to receive aPh.D. from the Institute of Life Science, Kyoto University in 2018, where he worked under the direction of Prof. Osamu Takeuchi. From 2018-2020, he was a program-specific researcher in Shenzhen Digital Life Institute and ASHBi, Japan. Dr. Xiaotong has a solid background in molecular cell biology, immunology and he participated in one special program for Key Basic Research of Ministry of Science and Technology, China. Now, he serves as a Field Application Specialist in Bio-Techne China.

Dr. Kasmira Wilson is a general surgeon and CSSANZ trainee, having previously completed a BSc(Hons) and MBBS. She is currently undertaking a PhD through the University of Melbourne at Peter MacCallum cancer centre which focuses on translational research in rectal cancer. Her research utilises tumouroid models to explore anti-tumour immunity in rectal cancer in a novel functional cytotoxic assay.

Dr. Dan Zhu is a professor of Huazhong University of Science & Technology, and Vice-Director of Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics. Her research interests mainly focus on tissue optical clearing imaging and applications. She is the pioneer in the field of in vivo tissue optical clearing, and also developed fast, label-compatible in vitro optical clearing methods. She has authored more than 150 papers including Science Advances, Nature Communications, et al. She is also Fellow of SPIE, and Secretary General & Vice President of Biomedical Photonics Committee of Chinese Optical Society. She serves for journals as editorial member or guest editor, including Biomedical Optics Express, Journal of Biomedical Optics, Scientific Reports, Journal of Innovative Optical Health Sciences, Frontier of Optoelectronics et al.

Dr. Graham Wright holds an interdisciplinary PhD in cell biology and physics from The University of Edinburgh and an MBA from the Warwick Business School at The University of Warwick. He is the Acting Director of A*STAR’s Research Support Centre (RSC) and the Director of the A*STAR Microscopy Platform (AMP). RSC offers everything from on-demand access to sophisticated scientific instruments and services, located within varied Technology Platforms, to a research consumables webstore, playing a crucial role in powering biomedical innovation in Singapore.

Dr. Graham has extensive experience, and a strong publication record, in applying advanced light microscopy to a wide range of biomedical research projects. Outside the laboratory, he is committed to science outreach and has featured as a judge on MediaCorp’s National Science Challenge TV show, presented a TEDx talk, had microscopy images displayed on the big screen in Times Square, New York and exhibited work at the National Museum of Singapore.

Mr. Srivats Hariharan is an Applications & Marketing Manager in Olympus life science team in the Asia Pacific region. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and has experience working in biomedical research labs and A*STAR Microscopy Core Facility where he supported researchers on confocal and live cell imaging technologies and help setup single molecule super-resolution and light sheet microscopes. He joined the life-science team of Olympus Singapore in 2011 as Product Manager and in-charge of supporting research customers and business partners in South-East Asia and Taiwan.

Ms. Gency Gunasingh completed her Master of biotechnology degree from University of Queensland in 2012 and did her Masters project under Dr. Andrew Prowse and Prof. Peter Gray at Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology. Her primary area of research was large scale generation of cardiac progenitors from embryonic stem cells in 3D. She then worked under Prof. Brian Gabrielli at UQ Diamantina institute on developing 3D tumour spheres in melanoma for in vitro drug testing. She currently works for Prof. Nikolas Haass at UQDI on understanding tumour heterogeneity and tumour architecture in melanoma spheroids.

Dr. Dong Gao is the Principal Investigator of Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research interests mainly focus on t prostate adult stem cell and the establishment of patients-derived cancer organoid biobank. He has authored more than 40 papers including Cell, Nature Genetics, Cell Stem Cell et al.

Dr. Yu Weimiao obtained his Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2007, majoring in image processing and machine vision. He joined the Agency of Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) in 2007. He is currently heading Computational Digital Pathology Lab (CMPL) in BII to deepen and extend the R&D with clinical and industrial partners. He is also the joint PI in IMCB leading the Computational & Molecular Pathology Lab (CMPL). His research interests are Computational Biomedical Image Analysis and Quantitative Imaging Informatics. He applied 3D image analysis solution to segment and tracking the cells in 3D to understand the developmental problem and collective cell migration mechanisms. His work was published in Nature Communication, Current biology, Nature Cell Biology, etc. To enhance the applications in clinical diagnosis/prognosis, he co-founded a biotech company, known as A!maginostic Pte. Ltd. He established a world-class joint platform for the immunodiagnosis at the tissue level. The platform allows the researchers, clinicians, and pharma to profile the patient immune signature for diagnosis, prognosis, and drug response study.

Dr. Motoki Takagi received PhD from Graduate School of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the University of Tokyo in 2001. Then he continued his research as a postdoctoral fellow at Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, the University of Tokyo. He was engaged in the research of nucleic acid drugs at Genencare Research Institute, Co. Ltd. since 2002. Since 2006, he conducted drug discovery research at Biological Systems Control Team, Biomedicinal Information Research Center, Japan Biological Informatics Consortium. Since 2012, he has been researching chemical biology as an associate professor at Fukushima Medical University and became a professor in 2014.

Dr. Ningbo Wu is an Associate Professor at Shanghai Institute of immunology, Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine. His research interests mainly focus on the function of intestinal stromal cells in intestinal homeostasis and related work was published in Nature and Science CHINA Life Sciences, et al.

Nuno Costa-Borges is devoted to offering quality control (QC) tests, training, and consulting services to the IVF community worldwide. With over 18 years’ experience, Nuno completed a PhD focused on improving animal cloning efficiency before joining IVI Barcelona as a clinical embryologist. Now, as cofounder and scientific director of Embryotools, Nuno is committed to developing new IVF techniques, which have led to the world’s first babies via maternal spindle transfer for infertility and to the development of the first robotic system for intracytoplasmic sperm injection successfully tested clinically.

Akira studied veterinary medicine at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan and graduated in 2007. Shortly after, he joined Olympus as application specialist responsible for in vivo imaging systems, high-content analysis systems, and laser confocal systems to support customers in Japan. In 2013, he took over sales promotion for all Olympus life science products. From 2018, he moved to Singapore and joined to support the marketing and application support for the APAC market.

Bob McLean has over 30 years’ experience as a microbiologist, during which time he and his lab have done a number of studies on surface-adherent microorganisms (biofilms). In 1998, he and his colleagues had an experiment on the space shuttle with John Glenn, in which they were one of the first research groups to show that biofilms could form in microgravity. Since that discovery, there have been a number of biofilm issues, notably instances of fouling in the water recovery system in the International Space Station and other spacecraft. In 2015, Bob, along with collaborators at Arizona State and the Johnson Space Center, received a NASA grant to study biofilm formation during spaceflight. Confocal and other types of microscopy have been instrumental in these investigations.

Jesse completed his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in cell biology and genomics. He then continued his training at the University of California, San Diego. After, he switched his focus to developing machine learning approaches for assessing the physiological impacts of genetic variants associated with hereditary cancer at UBC. During this time, he started to develop deep learning approaches to automated phenotypic profiling based on high-content imaging data.

James Lopez received his Ph.D. in biomedical sciences from the University of Chicago in 2010. With nearly a decade of experience in calcium imaging, FRET, live cell imaging, and intravital imaging, James joined Olympus as a confocal and multiphoton sales representative. He later transitioned to the Olympus Life Science Applications Group, supporting confocal and multiphoton systems. Now he manages the Life Science Applications Group in the US, Canada, and Latin America markets.

Yosuke Yoneyama obtained his Ph.D. from The University of Tokyo in Japan, where he continued his post-doctoral work on insulin/insulin-like growth factor signaling with a focus on spatiotemporal control of the intracellular signaling system in the laboratory of Dr. Shin-Ichiro Takahashi. He then joined the laboratory of Dr. Takanori Takebe at Tokyo Medical and Dental University in Japan as an assistant professor. He now focuses on human organoids, in particular liver organoids, that are derived from stem cells, including induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), to reconstitute multiple lineages of liver cells both for human development and modeling diseases such as non-alcoholic steatohepatitis.

Professor Ewa M. Goldys is Deputy Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Nanoscale Biophotonics (cnbp.org.au) and Professor at the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.  She is Fellow of SPIE, OSA, the Australian Academy of Technological Science and Engineering (ATSE), and winner of the 2016 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for ‘Innovative Use of Technology.’ She has ongoing involvement with SPIE BIOS, the world's largest international biomedical optics meeting and SPIE's Photonics West where she serves as Track Chair in Nanobiophotonics.

Her research spans the areas of biomedical science, bioimaging, biosensing, and materials science. She developed novel approaches to biochemical and medical sensing and deployable medical diagnostics. Current projects focus on cancer nanotechnology and non-invasive high-content imaging of colors and patterns in cells and tissues.

Dr. Laura Vittadello is working as a post-doc in the physics department of the Osnabrück University in the ultrafast physics research group. Her research focus is on the fundamental study and application of a new type of marker, harmonic nanoparticles, that are specially designed for biological applications that involve nonlinear microscopy.

After receiving his M.Sc. in Biological Sciences from the University of Pisa in Oct 2003 and his Diploma in Biological Sciences in the same year (both with honors) from SNS, Francesco Cardarelli worked at the NEST Laboratory of SNS as a Ph.D. student in Molecular Biophysics under the supervision of Prof. Fabio Beltram. He started his interdisciplinary research at the crossroads between cell biology and physics, using advanced fluorescence microscopy methods to study the intracellular transport properties of virus-derived peptide sequences. After graduating, he became a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics, University of California at Irvine, under the supervision of Prof. Enrico Gratton, where he coordinated the research activity for the development of new spatial variants of fluorescence correlation spectroscopy to detect barriers to molecular diffusion/flow in live cells. In Dec 2010 he was hired by the CNI@NEST (IIT) as a Post-Doctoral Fellow. Back in Italy, he started working to develop new fluorescence-based imaging and analysis methods to study single molecules in complex biological systems with high spatiotemporal resolution. This research was boosted by a number of funded grants (and established collaborations) and by an independent scientific position, first at CNR as a Researcher, then at SNS as Professor in Applied Physics.

The focus of his research is on the development of new optical microscopy techniques to increase the amount of quantitative information that can be extracted from investigations on living matter. For instance, in recent years, he and his team introduced a number of new spatiotemporal fluctuation-analysis tools (iMSD, iRICS, nD-pCF, diffusion tensor analysis, etc.) to extract structural and dynamic properties of biological objects, from molecules to entire sub-cellular structures, in their complex natural environment. Such a toolbox is becoming a new paradigm for biophysical investigations at the nanoscale, as featured in the “New and Notable” section of Biophysical Journal (2016 Aug 23; 111(4): 677–678). In 2014, together with his Team, they demonstrated the occurrence of short-range protein Brownian motion in the cell cytoplasm, being among the first to challenge the current view of the structural organization of the crowded intracellular environment. Finally, by combining this toolbox with feedback-based orbital tracking, they demonstrated that even the nanoscopic and dynamic environment of intracellular organelles can be quantitatively probed.

Dr. Roy completed a double-major in Biochemistry and Microbiology followed by the completion of a Doctor of Philosophy in 2002 in the field of Molecular Biology/Cell Biology at the University of Queensland Australia. She travelled abroad to undertake a post-doctoral position at Washington University in St Louis, USA. She then returned to Australia to continue her post-doctoral studies.

With her extensive microscopy experience, she was appointed as the University of Queensland Diamantina Institute Microscopy Facility Manager in 2009 and later as manager of microscopy services at the Translational Research Institute in Brisbane until 2019.

She is now Business Development Manager at Olympus Australia, where her experience and knowledge is used to support customers both in Australia and New Zealand.

Seungil Kim, Ph.D., is a Staff Scientist and Microscopy Team Manager at the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine at USC. Dr. Kim completed his B.S. and M.S. degrees in South Korea. He then moved to Washington University and received a doctoral degree in Developmental Biology. He carried out his postdoctoral research in the department of Cell and Tissue Biology at UCSF. Seungil has over 10 years of experience working with various in vitro/in vivo models and advanced cellular imaging techniques. His current research focus is to understand the contributions of the tumor microenvironment to drug response, using patient-derived 3D organoids as a model system. Moreover, he is developing high-throughput automated imaging methods to screen novel drug compounds in colorectal cancer.

Alfonso has a decade of experience working in a shared resource lab (SRL) with a vast knowledge in histology, fluorescent microscopy, and image analysis. His work has been focused in maximizing the capabilities of the equipment available and in creating technical protocols and training modules for the scientific community. Currently, Alfonso oversees the Histology and Bioimaging Facility as part of the Hugh Green Cytometry Centre (HGCC) at the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research in Wellington, New Zealand.

Tong Wu joined Olympus in 2012 after completing her Ph.D. in China (State Key Laboratory of Fine Chemicals, DLUT). Now, Tong is a business development manager, supporting high-end microscopes in Olympus Australia. With a research background in fluorescent dyes for bio-imaging and bio-labelling, Tong Wu is enthusiastic to engage with customers’ research applications.

Prof. Portugues is a neurobiologist studying sensorimotor control. His research group uses behavior, modeling, optogenetics, in vivo electrophysiology, and whole brain functional calcium imaging to dissect learning, memory, and action selection in the larval zebrafish.

Prof. Portugues studied mathematics and did his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Trinity College in the University of Cambridge. After a short postdoctoral fellowship in physics at Centro de Estudios Cientificos in Valdivia, Chile, he joined Professor Florian Engert’s laboratory at Harvard University and switched research interests to neuroscience. In 2014 he was appointed Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried. Since 2020 Prof. Portugues is an assistant professor at the TUM.

Atsuya Toda is an assistant manager for Global Life Science Marketing at Evident. He has more than fifteen years’ experience in life science microscopy sales, sales planning, and marketing in Japan. In 2021, he moved to the Global Life Science Marketing team where he is the marketing representative for the APEXVIEW APX100 all-in-one microscope. He holds a Bachelor of Economics degree from Doshisha University, Japan.

Laura Lleras Forero is the product marketing manager for cell culture products at Evident. She completed her PhD at King’s College London and undertook postdocs in Utrecht, Berlin, and Münster. She has been with Evident since 2021, supporting cell culture microscopy solutions, the SLIDEVIEW™ VS200 research slide scanner, and the APEXVIEW™ APX100 all-in-one microscope for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA).

Ines Hartmann is an application specialist for cell handling at the Eppendorf headquarters in Hamburg, Germany. She joined the company in 2008 and has worked on several topics in cell handling, liquid handling, and consumables. She obtained her diploma degree in biology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany and has expertise in various laboratory techniques.

Featured Speaker Amin El-Heliebi (Professor) Professor Amin El-Heliebi was educated in Graz, Stockholm and Buenos Aires and was appointed Research Professor 2021 at the Medical University of Graz, Austria. His research focus lies in molecular biomarkers, cancer research, liquid biopsy, tumor biology, and spatial transcriptomics. His overarching research question deals with understanding tumor dissemination. His research group investigates liquid biopsies, such as circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA). Their overall aim is to track and trace liquid biopsies back to the originating tumor mass and identify the mechanisms involved in spreading of metastatic disease.