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Meike Sievers (née Schurr) received her undergraduate studies at the University of Konstanz and University of Heidelberg. She attained a B.Sc. in 2013 and M.Sc. degree in 2016 majoring in physics. Her interest in neuroscience was sparked during her bachelors when she went to Paris for 6 months to investigate two-photon microscopy in the mouse auditory system at the Institute of Biology of the École Normale Supérieure (IBENS) under the supervision of Laurent Bourdieu. For her masters, she joined the group of Moritz Helmstaedter at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research (MPIBR) in Frankfurt am Main, working on EM based connectomics. In 2016, she continued to do her PhD on large-scale connectomics in mouse barrel cortex using multibeam-scanning electron microscopy. In July 2023, she has started a postdoctoral appointment as a Marie Sklodowska Curie Research Fellow at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland, in the Structural Neurobiology Group of Adrian A. Wanner, where she currently explores new methods for synaptic resolution X-ray tomography.

Angus Kirkland completed his MA and PhD at the University of Cambridge using high resolution electron microscopy to study the structures of colloidal metals.

Following a post-doctoral Fellowship Angus was elected to the Ramsay Memorial Trust Research Fellowship and subsequently as Senior Research Associate in Cambridge. In 2005 he was appointed as professor of materials at Oxford University and in 2011 as JEOL professor of Electron Microscopy. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Microscopical Society and is the author of over 350 refereed papers. He is also Fellow of Linacre College Oxford.

In 2005 he was awarded the Microscopy Society of America Award for the best paper published and in 2015 was awarded the Harald Rose Distinguished Lecture and Prize for Contributions to Image Processing and Exit Wavefunction Reconstruction. In 2012 Angus was appointed as an Honorary Professor, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Republic of South Africa.

As Science Director for ePSIC Angus’ role is the strategic scientific development of ePSIC and working with the staff scientists and Operations Director to ensure the delivery of a leading user facility.

His current research interests include the development and applications of aberration corrected HRTEM for structural studies of nanomaterials, the design of direct electron detectors and electron optics and computational image processing and theory for phase retrieval and quantitative electron microscopy.

Abstract: More than five decades ago, Albert Crewe showed stunning images of individual heavy atoms that his team had captured using the first high-resolution scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM). Based on this project Michael Beer started a project to sequence DNA that carried nucleotides marked with heavy atoms. Even before these advances, Elmar Zeitler showed that the electron microscope could measure the mass of small particles. STEM emerged as the tool of choice to apply this method to single molecule complexes and supramolecular assemblies. Foundations for quantitative mass measurements emerged in the seventies.

In the 1980s, Ondrej Krivanek and Christian Colliex demonstrated the analytical capability of high-resolution STEM equipped with an energy filter, with applications in materials science and biology. This was followed by element mapping at atomic resolution. Walter Hoppe invented ptychography, an idea that only became an experimental reality after many decades.

Today, 4D STEM stimulates inspiring discussions and the first applications are emerging in both biology and materials science.

Biography: Andreas Engel studied physics and mathematics at the University of Bern and received his doctorate in 1972. After a stay at Johns Hopkins University, he came to the Biozentrum in Basel, where he was appointed professor of structural biology in 1986 and, together with Ueli Aebi, founded the Maurice E. Müller Institute for Structural Biology. After retiring in 2010, Engel went to Case Western Reserve University to create the Cleveland Center for Membrane and Structural Biology. He also worked on membrane proteins at the Bionanoscience Department at TU Delft before becoming a co-founder of cryoWrite AG in 2020.

Andreas Engel pioneered the use of scanning electron (STEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) to image biomolecular complexes. Using mass measurement with STEM, electron crystallography and AFM, he investigated the structure of supramolecular complexes. The analyzes targeted bacterial envelopes and molecular machines of virulent pathogens. The teams of Andreas and Yoshinori Fujiyoshi, together with Peter Agre, determined the structure of aquaporin-1. Engel’s team and Krzysztof Palczewski showed how rhodopsin is arranged in the retina. Andreas developed the nanoscience curriculum that attracted many young talents to the University of Basel. Similar programs were later established at other top universities.