Bridging Electron Microscopy in Life Sciences and Material Sciences – Common Challenges and Opportunities

Name: Bridging Electron Microscopy in Life Sciences and Material Sciences – Common Challenges and Opportunities
Start: 2025-07-22T07:45:00
End: 2025-07-23T15:00:00

July 22, 2025, 9:45am - July 23, 2025, 5:00pm

The Alliance Centre Electron Microscopy (ACEM) of the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) cordially invites you to the ACEM Symposium "Bridging Electron Microscopy in Life Sciences and Material Sciences - Common Challenges and Opportunities", which will take place on 22 and 23 July 2025 at the MDC Buch.

The symposium will focus on the interdisciplinary exchange between life sciences and material sciences in the field of electron microscopy. Both disciplines are driving the development of this key technology from different perspectives - and are increasingly benefiting from each other. For example, the life sciences are introducing highly sensitive, spatially resolved detectors for their highly sensitive samples, which also benefit the materials sciences in terms of more precise measurements of physical relationships. Conversely, developments in spatial resolution in materials science are opening up new possibilities in biological imaging. The use of big data and artificial intelligence is another common theme for the future that can bring both fields closer together.

With this symposium, ACEM would like to specifically address students and young scientists from the BUA and BR50 areas and encourage them to actively participate. In particular, they are invited to submit a poster for one of the following sessions:

Volume SEM
Artificial Intelligence in Electron Microscopy
Quantitative Phase-sensitive S/TEM Methods
In Operando and Time Resolved EM

A special highlight of the program is the participation of international experts such as Prof. Colin Ophus (Berkeley and Stanford), a pioneer of 4D STEM methods; Prof. Knut Müller-Caspary, who was recently appointed at LMU Munich and is one of the most promising minds in German electron microscopy; and Norman Rezepka (Scalable Minds, Potsdam), a leading expert in handling large-volume EM data sets. Professor Martin Beck, director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics, is a renowned expert in cryo-electron tomography, focusing on integrative methods. He combines cryo-ET, mass spectrometry, molecular modeling, and AI to answer structural biology questions at the molecular level. Professor Marc Willinger, recently appointed at the Technical University of Munich, is an internationally recognized expert in in situ and operando electron microscopy, focusing on catalysis research. David Haselbach, a research group leader and head of a technology platform at the Research Institute for Molecular Pathology in Vienna, investigates the structures and functions of biomolecular machinery — particularly the ubiquitin-proteasome system — using time-resolved cryo-EM techniques.

With its excellent research landscape - from universities to non-university institutions in the BR50 network - Berlin offers a unique concentration of electron microscopy expertise. The aim of the symposium is to bring these forces together and to raise the international profile of Berlin as a centre of science and innovation.