In April 2023, Minister of Education, Culture and Science Robbert Dijkgraaf officially opened the renovated Electron Microscopy Centre (EMC) in Utrecht. In what used to be a somewhat disjointed field of science, the EMC provides a hub where researchers from all the relevant disciplines have access to the expensive equipment for electron microscopy. This significant development is the result of the intensive efforts of the Perspectief consortium Microscopy Valley, with Delft University of Technology as one of the parties.

The paper: “Voltage imaging with engineered proton-pumping Rhodopsins: Insights from the proton transfer pathway” by Xin Meng and Vidya Ganapathy et al has been selected to be featured as an ACS Editors' Choice in addition to being published in ACS Physical Chemistry Au. The paper has been selected for this honor because of its potential for broad public interest.

How do we get pupils interested in science, and especially physics? One way is to develop lessons that are relevant to them. Freek Pols published an article for physics teachers in which the physics of Spiderman is investigated.

Similar in function to ballast tanks in submarines or fish bladders, many water-based bacteria use gas vesicles to regulate their floatability. In a publication in Cell, scientists from TU Delft now describe the molecular structure of these vesicles for the first time. These gas vesicles were also recently repurposed as contrast agents for ultrasound imaging.

Dr. Hamed Abbasi joined ImPhys as Postdoc. He will explore clinical applications of computational scattered light imaging under the supervision of Dr. Miriam Menzel.

Yutong Wang joined ImPhys on February 15th. He will work on 3D super-resolution microscopy under the supervision of Prof. Sjoerd Stallinga and Prof. Bernd Rieger.

On 20 February, NL-BioImaging (NL-BI) received national funding of 25 million euro, of which 15 million by NWO. The funding supports the consortium in becoming the national advanced light microscopy infrastructure providing coordinated access to the Netherlands’ best imaging technology and analysis platforms. NL-BI is a multi-sited collaboration of all 18 Dutch universities, medical academic centres and research institutes.

Ahmed B. Ayoub joined ImPhys per February 1st as postdoctoral researcher. He will work on super-resolution microscopy under supervision of Prof. Sjoerd Stallinga.

Mohammad joined ImPhys as a PhD student in the European doctorate program enabling the next generation of computational physicists and engineers (ENGAGE). He is working under the supervision of Dr. Eric Verschuur.

Freek Pols published a frontline article: Collaborative data collection: shifting focus on meaning making during practical work. In this paper he presents, together with a high school teacher, an approach to practical work in which data collection is minimized freeing time for the more cognitive demanding tasks such as data-analysis and drawing conclusions.