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Single Molecule Workshop

25th International Anniversary Workshop on
“Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Super-resolution Microscopy in the Life Sciences”

September 3-6, 2019 in Berlin, Germany

Image Single Molecule Workshop 2019

Group picture of the attendees of the 25th Single Molecule Workshop

Summary

Poster Session Over 230 scientists from all over the world joined PicoQuant to celebrate the Workshop’s 25th anniversary in Berlin from September 3 to 6, 2019. The attendees, ranging from famous, well-established researchers to young, upcoming enthusiastic scientists, gathered to report on and discuss the latest developments in the field of Single Molecule Detection (SMD) and advanced microscopy techniques.

The scientific program of the 25th anniversary wokrshop included 23 keynote and invited lectures by renowned speakers, 32 contributed talks, and more than 110 posters. The call for papers was so incredibly successful that many excellent applications for oral presentations had to be switched to posters. However, four "flash talk" sessions were introduced where selected authors could give a short oral preview of their poster.

Nobel laureate W.E. Moerner holding his keynote lecture at the 25th Single Molecule WorkshopAmong this year’s scientific highlights were the talks by Nobel prize laureates Stefan Hell and W.E. Moerner, which gave an in-depth review of the development of optical super-resolution microscopy in the last 30 years and where the field might be heading next. In his closing remarks, W.E. Moerner thanked attendees and organizers alike: “Thank you, Rainer and our friends at PicoQuant, for nurturing and enabling so much of this important field of science!”

The meeting featured many other exciting contributions such as an invited presentation by Aleksandra Radenovic (EPFL, Switzerland) on using SMD to study luminescent defects in atomically thin 2D materials or a poster by Julia Heiby (Julius-Maximilian Universität Würzburg, Germany) which focused on studying the interactions between proteins in spider silk. Many contributions illustrated the fact that the field , while mature, is still growing. New methods such a MINFLUX, Metal Induced Energy Transfer (MIET), and Pulse Interleaved Excitation (PIE) becoming mainstream. In parallel, the focus of the community is moving towards even more applications in life and materials science, focusing on quantification of proteins, fluorophores, energy harvesting material, or using gold in its many nanoscopic forms for local optical enhancement.

“It is a great pleasure to not only see so many good friends but also enthusiastic young researchers attending this year’s workshop”, says Rainer Erdmann, Managing Director of PicoQuant, “Today, the meeting has established itself as the leading platform to promote the field of single molecule research and advanced microscopy techniques. It has become a kind of family event for many participants.” Besides the exciting scientific program, attendees celebrated an anniversary party at the stadium of the local soccer team 1. FC Union, the “Alte Försterei”. The party program offered, besides a dinner buffet, sports and games, a guided tour through the stadium as well as a music band formed by PicoQuant employees playing live on stage.

During the workshop, PicoQuant had the chance to conduct interviews with some of the leading researchers in single molecule research. Please see the video section of our website.

 

Open afternoon on Wednesday, September 4

Nobel laureate Stefan Hell holding his keynote lecture at the 25th Single Molecule WorkshopTo celebrate the 25th anniversary of the workshop, PicoQuant invited the public to join the workshop for free during the afternoon of Wednesday, September 4, 2019. Around 20 visitors took the opportunity to listen to a series of talks by reknown scientists and to participate in a poster session as well as product presentations by PicoQuant. A special highlight of this Open Afternoon was a keynote lecture by Nobel laureate Stefan W. Hell entitled “Optical microscopy: the resolution revolution”.

Group picture of the Keynote and Invited Speakers

Keynote speakers

Invited speakers

Emeritus guests

  • Frans de SchryverFrans de Schryver
    KU Leuven, Belgium

Program

The program is still available for download:

Student award

Winners of the Student Award 2019PicoQuant especially wants to encourage young scientists to present their work. Therefore, the jury - consisting of the invited speakers and PicoQuant's managing director Rainer Erdmann - evaluated the presentations given by students. Selecting a single winner from this year’s outstanding 15 contributions proved to be so challenging that the jury decided to nominate three winners.

The 1500 Euro prize was split between Arindam Ghosh (University of Göttingen, Germany) for his talk on “graphene based metal induced energy transfer for sub-nanometer optical localization”, Kristyna Holanova (Institute of Photonics and Electronics of the CAS, Czech Republic) for her work on “revealing single-protein function by high-speed tracking of individual domains”, and Tim Schröder (University of Munich, Germany) for his presentation on “following the fate of excitions in multi-chromophoric nanoparticles”.

 

Archive

The workshop on "Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Ultra Sensitive Analysis in the Life Sciences" is an annual event since 1995. To get an impression of our Single Molecule Workshops have a look at the video below.

For a summary of each year's event, please select the year from the list below.

 

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