Speaker

Dr. Steven R. Spurgeon is a Senior Materials Data Scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and holds a Joint Faculty position at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, USA. He is a pioneer in autonomous materials science, developing artificial intelligence-driven workflows to accelerate the discovery of functional materials for energy applications and extreme environments. His development of the award-winning “AutoEM" autonomous microscope platform has resulted in commercialized technologies and prestigious honors, including the R&D 100 Award and the Microscopy Society of America's Burton Medal. Deeply committed to training future scientists, Dr. Spurgeon actively mentors a diverse group of students and postdoctoral researchers. As co-PI for the $14M APEX DOE Energy Frontier Research Center, he and his team apply these novel methods to design the next generation of energy-efficient power electronics.

Maria Varela obtained her BS (1997) and PhD (2001) in Physics at the Complutense University, Madrid, Spain. She joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a Wigner Fellow in 2002 and was a Research Staff Member in the Materials Science and Technology Division until 2012. In 2010 she also became a Professor at Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) after being the recipient of an European Research Council Award. Now she is a Full Professor in Condensed Matter Physics and also the director of the National Center for Electron Microscopy at UCM since 2023. She has authored over two hundred research articles and has been the recipient of awards such as the Burton Medal of the Microscopy Society of America, and she is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Spain. Her research experience includes thin film growth, transport properties and structural characterization by electron microscopy, specializing in aberration corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy and atomic resolution energy-loss spectroscopy, including in-situ studies.  Her main research interests include a variety of topics related to magnetism and complex oxide nanosystems, thin films and superlattices, including high Tc superconductors, colossal magnetoresistance materials, multiferroics, dilute magnetic semiconductors and other materials.

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.

Roger Wepf is Director of the Centre for Microscopy and Microanalysis at The University of Queensland, where he leads advances in correlative and multimodal imaging across life, materials, and earth sciences. His work has shaped imaging workflows by integrating high-pressure freezing, cryo-transfer, FIB/SEM, SIMS, and volume CLEM into unified platforms.

His co-development of foundational methods—from VCT, and Shuttle & Find to HPM100 vitrification and OMNY—has influenced commercial systems still in use in the community. At UQ, Roger leads the NRICH initiative to apply CLEM and multimodal analytics to critical minerals, circular economy, and environmental resilience.

Looking ahead, he advocates for “Google Earth”-like navigation through biological and material complexity—powered by new instrumentations, HPC, and scalable open standards. His keynote reflects a career committed to bridging modalities and enabling discovery across disciplines.

Knut Müller-Caspary was born in 1981 and received his Ph.D from Bremen University (Germany) in 2011. Between 2011 and 2016 he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in Bremen focussing on strain, composition and electric field mapping by momentum-resolved STEM. He established cooperations with several companies to explore new detectors as to speed, dynamic range, efficiency and in-situ capability. In particular, Knut contributed key developments to the mapping of atomic electric fields and charge densities at subatomic scale by exploiting the full complexity of STEM diffraction patterns. In 2016 Müller-Caspary moved to the EMAT institute at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) where he applied STEM to the electrical characterisation of 2D materials. In 2018 he established a Helmholtz Young Investigator Group for momentum-resolved STEM at the Ernst-Ruska-Centre in Jülich (Germany) and became junior professor at RWTH Aachen University in 2019. Since 2021, Knut Müller-Caspary is university professor at the faculty of chemistry and pharmacy at Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich (Germany) where he extended his research towards numerous interdisciplinary cooperations with biologists and mathematicians. Current activities include the event-based ptychographic phase retrieval of organic or biological specimens under low-dose conditions and of nanostructures for energy conversion in the presence of thermal diffuse scattering.

Helmut Kohl studied physics at the TH Darmstadt and completed his PhD-thesis on the theory of image formation using inelastically scattered electrons under the supervision of Harald Rose in 1983. Subsequently he worked for one year as a post-doc at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides in Orsay (France). In 1989 he finished his habilitation on site-sensitive electron energy loss spectroscopy in the transmission electron microscope. After a guest professorship at the TU Wien and a stay at the MPI Stuttgart he became a professor for experimental physics at the University Münster in 1993. His research is mostly focussed on electron energy loss spectroscopy and image formation using inelastically scattered electrons using energy filtering TEM or STEM.