Prof. Jeremy J. Baumberg FRS, is the Harald Aspden Professor of Fundamental Physics at the University of Cambridge, directing a key UK NanoPhotonics Centre. He develops optical materials structured on the nanoscale, with strong experience at Hitachi, IBM, and his spin-offs combining academic insight with innovation. With over 47000 citations (h-111), he is a leading innovator in Nano, leading to awards including the IoP Faraday gold Medal (2017) and Royal Society Rumford Medal (2014). He is a strategic advisor on nanotechnology to the UK. His recent popular science book is “The Secret Life of Science: How Science Really Works and Why it Matters”. see np.phy.cam.ac.uk.

Talk title: Watching single molecule electrochemistry

Thomas W. Ebbesen is a physical chemist educated in the United States and France, receiving his bachelor degree from Oberlin College (USA) and his PhD from the Curie University in Paris. He then did research in both the US and Japan, most notably at NEC Corp., before returning to France in 1999 to help build a new institute (ISIS) at the University of Strasbourg. He is currently the head of the Center for Frontier Research in Chemistry and the Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Studies (www.usias.fr). He holds the chair of physical chemistry of light-matter interactions. The author of many papers and patents, Ebbesen has received numerous awards for his pioneering research including the 2014 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience for his transformative contributions to nano-optics. Over the past 15 years, his team made the first demonstrations that chemistry and ground state material properties can be modified by coupling electronic and vibrational transitions to the vacuum electromagnetic field.

Talk Title : The Alchemy of Vacuum

Fedor Jelezko is Director of the Institute of Quantum Optics and Director of the Centre for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology (IQST) at the University of Ulm. He studied in Minsk (Belarus) and received his PhD in 1998. After receiving habitation at the University of Stuttgart in 2010, he was appointed Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Ulm in 2011. His research interests lie at the interface between fundamental quantum physics and the application of spin qubits in diamond for information processing, communication, sensing and imaging.

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Philipp Kukura is Professor of Chemistry and Fellow of Exeter College at the University of Oxford. He received an MChem from the University of Oxford (2002) and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (2006). After postdoctoral work at ETH Zurich, he joined the Chemistry Department at the University of Oxford as Research Fellow (2010) before becoming a Lecturer (2011), and promotion to full Professor (2016). Honours and awards include the Klung- Wilhelmy Science award in Chemistry (2018), the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists UK in Chemistry (2019), the Emil Thomas Kaiser Ward by the Protein Society (2022) and the Sackler International Prize in Biophysics (2023). He is the founder of Refeyn Ltd, which has commercialised and thereby enabled broad access to Mass Photometry. His current research focusses on the application of light microscopy combined with mass measurement at the single molecule level to study biomolecular structure and interactions. 

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Prof. Laura Na Liu received her Ph. D in Physics at University of Stuttgart, Germany. She then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and as a Texas Instruments visiting professor at Rice University, respectively. Before she became a professor at the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics at University of Heidelberg in 2015, she had worked as an independent group leader at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. In 2020, she joined University of Stuttgart and became the Director of the 2. Physics Institute.

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Prof. Aleksandra Radenovic is a full professor of biological engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and head of the Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology. Her lab works in the research field that can be termed single-molecule biophysics. She has received her Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland.) in 2003 and a Msc. in Physics from the University of Zagreb (Croatia) in 2000. In 2010. she received a European Research Council
(ERC) Starting Grant in 2010 and SNF Backup scheme Consolidator Grant (2015). She is also the recipient of the CCMX materials challenge award in 2016 and the Advanced ERC (2020) grant. She develops techniques and methodologies based on optical imaging, bio-sensing and single-molecule manipulation with the aim to monitor the behavior of individual biological molecules and complexes in vitro and in live cells.

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Ronald Walsworth is a Professor of Physics and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland (UMD); and Founding Director of the UMD Quantum Technology Center.  He received his PhD in Physics in 1991 from Harvard University and later served on the Harvard faculty for about 20 years.  His research interests are in developing precision measurement tools and applying them to diverse problems across the physical and life sciences.  He has also co-founded several technology companies in areas ranging from biomedical imaging to quantum sensing. 

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Martin D. Baaske has studied physics the University of Bayreuth (Germany). He obtained his PhD at the Max-Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen (Germany) for his research on the label-free detection of single-molecules using Whispering Gallery Mode resonators. Afterwards he joined Michel Orrit’s laboratory at the Leiden University (Netherlands) with a Marie Skłodowska Curie fellowship. There he worked on plasmonic single-molecule detection with high temporal resolution. Following a short postdoctoral stay at the JGU Mainz (Germany) he joined Eugen Kim’s group at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics as postdoctoral researcher. His research interests encompass the label-free plasmonic detection of single molecules and their conformational dynamics, photothermal microscopy and more recently fluorescent-based single-molecule imaging. 

Talk title: Coming soon

Patricia Bassereau is CNRS Research Director at Institut Curie (Paris) and leads the group "Membranes and cellular functions". She obtained a PhD in Soft Matter in Montpellier where she started her carrier on the structure of self-assembled surfactant-based systems. After a year at IBM Almaden Center (San Jose, USA), she moved to Institut Curie in 1993 to work on "Physics of the Cell" and cell membranes. In 2015 she received the Suffrage Science Award (Royal Society, UK), in 2017 the Emmy Noether Distinction for Women in Physics (EPS), she is Fellow of the Biophysical Society since 2018 and Elected EMBO Member since 2020. For her research, she develops a multidisciplinary approach, largely based on synthetic biology and biomimetic systems, as well as quantitative mechanical and microscopy methods to understand the dynamics, the organization and the mechanics of biological membranes.

Talk Title : Membrane mechanics affects transmembrane proteins’ dynamics and function

Maria Garcia-Parajo is an ICREA Research Professor at ICFO-Institute of Photonic Sciences, leading the Single Molecule Biophotonics group. Her research focuses on the development of advanced optical techniques to the study of biological processes at the single molecular level on living cells. She obtained her PhD in Physical Electronics in 1993 at Imperial Colleague, UK. Previous experience includes research at L2M- CNRS Paris (FR) and University of Twente (NL). To date she has published more than 200 publications and delivered more than 250 talks at international conferences and workshops upon invitation. She coordinates several international research projects, and is member of various international scientific advisory, executive and editorial boards. She has received several prestigious awards, including National Prize in Biophysics (2017), Advanced ERC grant (2017) and Emmy Noether Laurate from the European Physical Society (2020). She is co-coordinator of the Winter School in Advanced Microscopy Techniques for the Master in Interdisciplinary Sciences at BIST and is actively involved in (inter)national actions to promote gender equity in Science.

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Chirlmin Joo, a professor specializing in single-molecule biophysics at TU Delft, is dedicated to unveil groundbreaking insights into the intricate relationship between sequence, structure, and function in biomolecules. For over a decade, he has spearheaded innovative research at the intersection of biophysics and nanotechnology. Through a new technique developed by his group, Single-molecule Parallel Analysis for Rapid eXploration of Sequence space (SPARXS), millions of sequences are dynamically explored, revealing sequence-dependent biophysical and biochemical properties at the single-molecule level. His research is supported by prestigious grants such as ERC and NWO.

Speech title : Single-molecule structural and kinetic studies across sequence space

Ulrich Keyser was appointed as Assistant Professor in 2007 and is now Professor of Applied Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. His research group consists of 15 members working on elucidating the physics of membrane transport, controlling molecules in nanopores, mimicking, and understanding protein channels. His experimental group uses single molecule techniques, nanopore sensing, DNA (origami) self-assembly, optical tweezers and microfluidics. He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant 2010-2015 and ERC Consolidator Grant (2015-2021). Currently, his lab is working on integrating RNA:DNA nanotechnology with solid-state nanopore based single-molecule biosensing for DNA data storage, studies of RNA structure, and disease detection. Web: www.keyserlab.org 

Talk Title : Single-molecule RNA readout using nanopores: From isoform analysis to disease diagnostics

Christopher Langhammer is Professor of Chemical Physics at Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden. He received his M.Sc. from ETH Zürich in 2004 and his PhD from Chalmers in 2009. His research combines advanced nanofabrication of nanostructured materials and devices, and next generation optical microscopy, with nanofluidics, surface physics, catalysis and sensor science. He is co-founder of Insplorion AB that commercialises plasmonic hydrogen sensors, and of Envue-Technologies AB that brings Nanofluidic Scattering Microscopy to the market.

Talk Title : Nanofluidic Scattering Microscopy and Spectroscopy of Single Nano-Objects

Michael Mayer is Professor of Biophysics at the Adolphe Merkle Institute of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.  He received a Ph.D. in biophysical chemistry with Horst Vogel at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), followed by postdoctoral research with George M. Whitesides at Harvard University.  In 2004, he started a faculty position in Biomedical Engineering and later in Biophysics at the University of Michigan.  In 2015, his group moved to the University of Fribourg, where he is currently the vice-director of the Adolphe Merkle Institute.  His research takes inspiration from nature to solve problems in biophysics, ranging from understanding signaling and transport processes in biological membranes to characterizing protein complexes relevant to neurodegenerative diseases and to engineering biocompatible electrical power sources.

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Peter Zijlstra is an associate professor of Molecular Plasmonics at Eindhoven University of Technology. He develops approaches for single-molecule sensing using plasmonic, nanophotonic and fluorescent approaches. His research group combines concepts from nanophotonics, super-resolution microscopy and electromagnetic modelling to develop novel optical sensing concepts and study biomolecular processes.

Talk Title : Single-molecule plasmon sensing across timescales