Scientific Organising Committee
Nigel Browning
Professor Nigel Browning is the Chair of Electron Microscopy and Director of the Albert Crewe Centre for Electron Microscopy at the University of Liverpool and Director of the proposed Relativistic Ultrafast Electron Diffraction and Imaging (RUEDI) National Facility. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Microscopy Society of America (MSA). He received the Burton Award from the MSA in 2002 and the Coble Award from the American Ceramic Society in 2003 for the development of atomic resolution methods in STEM and an Alexander von Humboldt research award in 2020. With his collaborators at LLNL he also received R&D 100 and Nano 50 Awards in 2008, and a Microscopy Today Innovation Award in 2010 for the development of the dynamic transmission electron microscope (DTEM).
He has over 400 refereed publications and 380 invited presentations on advanced STEM/TEM methods. Recently he is a co-founder of a start-up company, SenseAI, commercializing IP he co-developed on Inpainting (>15 patents on compressive sensing/machine learning for imaging).
Eva Olsson
Eva Olsson is a professor of experimental physics at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Olsson received her PhD from Chalmers and was thereafter a postdoc at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, physical sciences, Yorktown Heights (New York, USA). She then joined the faculty at Chalmers followed by an appointment as full professor at the Ångström laboratory, Uppsala University, Sweden. She was subsequently appointed full professor at the department of physics, Chalmers.
Olsson is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, physics class. She has been the general secretary and later president of Scandem (The Nordic Microscopy Society). She has been a member of the executive committee of the International Federation of Microscopy Societies (IFSM) and was subsequently elected general secretary of IFSM and thereafter the president of IFSM.
Olsson is a Fellow of The University of Tokyo (Japan), a member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology and a John Cowley Distinguished Lecturer at Arizona State University (USA). She is mainly involved in studies of materials for emerging technologies, including catalysis, photovoltaics and quantum devices. Her research group focuses on the development of novel characterisation techniques.
Olsson works with electron microscopy including in situ studies and quantitative imaging and spectroscopy. She is a pioneer in the field of in situ studies electron microscopy studies for site-specific correlation between structure and electro-optical properties down to the atomic length scale. Her contributions also include method developments for dynamic in situ manipulation and stimulation.
Thomas C. Isabell
Dr. Isabell was appointed as President of JEOL USA in April 2026 and was previously Vice President of Sales and Marketing from April 2025. Prior to that he was promoted to Vice President of Product Management in April 2020. He has been a member of the JEOL management team since 2003, including Director of Product Management, overseeing a team of product managers and scientists responsible for sales support, customer technical support, instrument demonstrations and analytical development for JEOL scientific instrument products.
He also served as Director of the Transmission Electron Microscope product division, managing a team of scientists and working closely with customers to help keep JEOL at the forefront of TEM technology in materials and life sciences research. He has been instrumental in the introduction of the ARM series TEMs and CryoARM TEMs. Prior to joining JEOL, Dr. Isabell held positions in business development at EmiSpec in Tempe, Arizona and applications support at Fischione Instruments in Export, Pennsylvania. Dr. Isabell received a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Minnesota and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University.
Jun Yuan
Prof Yuan has expertise in Nanophysics and nanomaterials, Electron energy loss spectroscopy, Aberration-free electron microscopy, Dynamical scanning probe microscopy. His research interests include; Nanophsycis: understanding the atomic structure, physical properties of nanomaterials, nanosystems and develop the application of the related nanotechnology and their characterization techniques. Electron Microscopy: development of advanced electron microscopy and related electron energy loss spectroscopy; physics of novel electron vortex beams and their applications in nanoscience and materials science.
Caterina Ducati
Prof Ducati is a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society (RMS) and a member of the Electron Microscopy and Analysis (EMAG) group of the Institute of Physics. In 2019 she was awarded the Medal for Innovation in Applied Microscopy for Materials Science by the Royal Microscopical Society (RMS, UK). She works on the characterization of nanostructured materials and devices using advanced analytical electron microscopy techniques, in particular focusing on materials for energy applications. She has published 228 articles and has an h index of 64.
Sarah Haigh
Prof Haigh leads a research group focussed on advanced transmission electron microscope (TEM) imaging and analysis. She has a particular interest in functional 2D materials, nanoparticle catalysts and developing in situ TEM imaging methods for which she holds an ERC Starter grant and was recently awarded an ERC consolidator grant. She is an elected Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Armourers and Brasiers and Director of the $100M bp International Centre for Advanced Materials. She has published over 200 journal papers, including 45 as corresponding author, and 5 book chapters (H-index =63, over 20000 citations).
Pete Nellist
Prof Nellist leads a research group that focuses on the applications and development of high-resolution electron microscope techniques, in particular scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM). Pete gained his PhD from the University of Cambridge. Since then he has worked in academia and in the commercial world in the UK, USA and Republic of Ireland. He has received awards from a number of different microscopy societies. He is a former President of the Royal Microscopical Society a former Board Member of the European Microscopy Society. He was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Society and Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Microscopical Society in 2020.
David Bhella
Prof Bhella is Director of the Scottish Centre for Macromolecular Imaging, Scotland’s national facility for structural biology research by cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM). Research in his laboratory focusses on the structural biology of viruses and virus-host interactions. During his career David has made key contributions to the understanding of influenza viruses, pneumoviruses, herpesviruses, adenoviruses, caliciviruses and coronaviruses. He has >60 peer reviewed articles and >7000 citations. David is an enthusiastic science communicator. In 2013 he was awarded the microbiology society Peter Wildy prize for microbiology education in recognition of his schools’ engagement work.
Gail McConnell
Following a first degree in Laser Physics and Optoelectronics (1998) and PhD in Physics from the University of Strathclyde (2002), Prof McConnell obtained a Personal Research Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2003) and a Research Councils UK Academic Fellowship (2005), securing a readership in 2008 and professorship in 2012. The work in Gail’s multidisciplinary research group involves the design, development and application of linear and nonlinear optical instrumentation and new methods for biomedical imaging, from the nanoscale to the whole organism. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society, where she is the current Vice Chair of the Light Microscopy Committee.
Layla B. Mehdi
Professor Mehdi is Scientific Theme Lead for the Energy Generation, Conversion and Storage Theme for the proposed Relativistic Ultrafast Electron Diffraction and Imaging (RUEDI) Facility. With over ten years of experience in the development and application of in-situ methods in electron microscopy for which she has received numerous awards. These include 2022 ERC Starting Grant Award, 2021 KIT International Excellence Grants and Fellowships Award, the 2019 Albert Crewe Award from the Microscopy Society of America for distinguished contributions to the field of Microscopy and Microanalysis in the physical sciences by an early career scientist, the 2015 MRS Postdoctoral Award, the 2015 Microscopy Society of America Award, the 2014 Microscopy & Microanalysis Presidential Award. She has over 70 publications and has organized multiple international in-situ TEM workshops and symposia and has given over 50 invited presentations at international meetings and institutions.
Roland Fleck
Roland A. Fleck PHD, FRCPath, FRMS, is a Professor of Ultrastructural Imaging and Academic Director of the Centre for Ultrastructural Imaging at King's College London. Having specialised in basic research into low temperature cellular injury and during cryo-preservation of cells and tissues he has developed specialist knowledge of freeze fracture/freeze etch preparation of tissues and wider cryo-microscopic techniques. As academic director of the Centre for Ultrastructural Imaging he supports advanced three-dimensional studies of cells and tissues by both conventional room temperature and cryo electron microscopy approaches.
He is a visiting Professor of the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen and Professor of the UNESCO Chair in Cryobiology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Institute for Problems of Cryobiology, Kharkiv, Ukraine.
Kerry Thompson
Prof Thompson is a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Imaging Scientist Fellow in the Anatomy Imaging and Microscopy Facility (AIM) and an Assistant Professor in Anatomy, School of Medicine in the University of Galway. In 2021 - awarded €3.6m from Science Foundation Ireland and the University of Galway to develop a Centre of Excellence in Multimodal Microscopy. 2020 - awarded a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Imaging Scientist Fellowship (~$750,000), one of twenty-two funded globally and the only successful Irish applicant.
Current work focuses on the establishment of doctoral training programmes in Microscopy and Imaging, technology development to assist multidisciplinary teams and career progression pathways for Imaging Scientists and Core Facility Staff.