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.

Freek Pols organized the NNV Landelijke practicumdag: An event for and by university physics lab course teachers. It was a great success with 40 people from 12 different institutes from the Netherlands.

Physicist David Maresca has received a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Dynamic Imaging grant to develop a next-generation medical ultrasound tool. While state-of-the-art ultrasound imaging, known to most as a baby’s first picture, can show our anatomy and organs, the new tool will be able to zoom in much further, all the way down to the level of the cells in our body.

Following in the footsteps of Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek and his groundbreaking microscope, Bernd Rieger and Sjoerd Stallinga unlocked the current world of microscopy, and showed us which innovations led us there, at the 181st birthday of TU Delft.