Microscopy is the technical field of using microscopes to view samples and objects that cannot be seen with the unaided eye (objects that are not within the resolution range of the normal eye). There are three well-known branches of microscopy: optical, electron, and scanning probe microscopy.

Optical and electron microscopy involve the diffraction, reflection, or refraction of electromagnetic radiation/electron beams interacting with the specimen, and the subsequent collection of this scattered radiation or another signal in order to create an image. This process may be carried out by wide-field irradiation of the sample (for example standard light microscopy and transmission electron microscopy) or by scanning of a fine beam over the sample (for example confocal laser scanning microscopy and scanning electron microscopy). Scanning probe microscopy involves the interaction of a scanning probe with the surface of the object of interest. The development of microscopy revolutionized biology and remains an essential technique in the life and physical sciences.

Stefan W. Hell (born 23 December 1962 in Arad, Romania) is a physicist and one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany as well as the head of the department "Optical Nanoscopy" at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg.

In 1981 Hell began his studies at the University Heidelberg (Germany), where, in 1990, he received his doctorate in physics. His thesis advisor was the solid-state physicist Siegfried Hunklinger. From 1991 to 1993 Hell worked at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg and from 1993 to 1996 he worked as a group leader at the University of Turku (Finland) in the department for Medical Physics, where he developed the principle for stimulated emission depletion STED microscopy. From 1993 to 1994 Hell was 6 months a visiting scientist at the University of Oxford (England). He received his habilitation in physics from the University of Heidelberg in 1996, and the following year became a group leader of his current research group dedicated to sub-diffraction-resolution microscopy at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen.

Dr. Eva Nogales (b. Madrid, Spain) is a biophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is a Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Eva Nogales works on structural and functional characterization of macromolecular complexes. Her lab uses electron microscopy, computational image analysis as well as functional biochemical assays to gain insights into function and regulation of the large biological assemblies.

Biography

Eva Nogales obtained her BS degree in physics from the Autonomous University of Madrid in 1988. She earned her PhD from the University of Keele in 1992 while working at the Synchrotron Radiation Source under the supervision of Joan Bordas.

During her post-doctoral work in the Ken Downing lab, Eva Nogales was the first to determine the atomic structure of tubulin by electron crystallography. She now continues to study microtubule dynamics in her own laboratory. In addition to microtubules, Dr. Nogales explores the structural and functional aspects of large macromolecular assemblies such as eukaryotic transcription and translation initiation complexes.

David A. Agard Ph.D. is a Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. He earned his B.S. in Molecular Biochemistry and Biophysics from Yale University and his Ph.D. in biological chemistry from California Institute of Technology. His research is focused on understanding the basic principles of macromolecular structure and function. He is a Scientific Director of the Institute for Bioengineering, Biotechnology, and Quantitative Biomedical Research and has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator since 1986.