My name is Siegfried Weisenburger and I am currently working as Head of R&D for the Dynamic Single Molecule business unit at LUMICKS in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Here, I am leading the development of new optical technologies for dynamic single molecule instrumentation, combining super-resolution fluorescence microscopy and label-free microscopy techniques with optical tweezers.
Before, I was a postdoctoral Leon Levy fellow at the Laboratory of Neurotechnology and Biophysics at the Rockefeller University in New York, United States. Here, and at the previous location of the lab at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria, I developed a fast volumetric calcium imaging method based on light sculpting called HyMS (Hybrid Multiplexed Sculpted Light) Microscopy that allows in-vivo recording of neuronal activity from unprecedented volume sizes at single-cell resolution at depth and across brain regions of awake and behaving mice.
Previously, I did my PhD in the Nano-Optics Division at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany. There, I combined cryogenics with single-molecule fluorescence microscopy and developed COLD (Cryogenic Optical Localization in 3D) microscopy, a method that allows to localize the positions of fluorophores in single proteins with Angstrom-scale resolution and provides a complementary approach to conventional methods in structural biology. I was also involved in several collaborations, amongst others with the Pharmacology Department of the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuernberg about dimerization of G-protein coupled receptors.
My master thesis in the laboratory of Markus Lippitz (then at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research and the 4th Physics Institute of the University of Stuttgart, Germany) was concerned with third-harmonic generation microscopy of plasmonic nano-structures. In a collaboration with the von Klitzing department, I also investigated the optical properties of graphene in a UV spectroscopy experiment.
“And by the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding.“
– Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665).
My research interests lie in the development and application of novel microscopy methods for biology, medicine and biophysics. I believe that the efforts for conceiving new imaging modalities and pushing both spatial and time resolutions are of great practical importance in science and technology. The combination of concepts from laser spectroscopy, quantum optics, photophysics, photochemistry, nanotechnology and biophysics will introduce many new avenues for optical imaging. Light microscopy will someday allow us to visualize and explore matter, be it biological or inorganic, at arbitrary resolution. It will let us see this new visible World in a light no one has seen it before.
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