Speaker

Dr Lewys Jones is the Ussher Associate Professor of Ultramicroscopy and leader of the Ultramicroscopy research group in the School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin. His group focuses on instrumentation and technique development for transmission electron microscopy.

He is the co-founder and CEO of turboTEM Limited; a spin-out company commercialising modular retrofittable TEM hardware upgrades.

He currently the Director of the RI-EPSRC CDT in the Advanced Characterization of Materials and a Board Member of the European Microscopy Society. Dr. Jones is a Member of the Institute of Physics and has been a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society since 2015.

Daniela Nicastro, Ph.D., is a structural cell biologist with 30 years of experience advancing electron microscopy to study cellular architecture. Her research focuses on visualizing macromolecular machines and organelles in their native cellular environment using high-resolution 3D imaging techniques, especially cryo-electron tomography. Dr. Nicastro received her M.S. and Ph.D. in Biology from Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, in collaboration with the Max-Planck Institute. She continued her work in the U.S. as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado and then as faculty at Brandeis University. Since 2015, she has been a Professor in the Department of Cell Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, where she also established a state-of-the-art cryo-EM core facility. Her lab develops and integrates cutting-edge imaging technologies to address fundamental questions in cell biology, with recent work providing new insights into the molecular architecture of motile cilia and the invasion machinery of pathogens like Toxoplasma.