ESRIC symposium 2018

The third annual ESRIC Symposium was hosted by the IGMM on the 23 January. More than 80 people attended, mainly from the Edinburgh research community. The interdisciplinary nature of ESRIC was well represented by the range of divisions that delegates and speakers came from, including engineering, chemistry, and medicine departments.

The day started with a demo of a compact STED microscope from Abberior Instruments, the STEDycon, with the symposium taking place in the afternoon.

Professor Rory Duncan and Ann Wheeler opened the meeting by describing the great ESRIC successes of the past year. This included a Wellcome Trust grant for new ESRIC instruments, publications in high impact journals, and ESRIC winning the Times Higher Education prize for STEM research project of the year.

From the IGMM, there were presentations from a current ESRIC PhD student Tooba Quidwai, as well as Chancellor’s Fellows’ Noor Gammoh and Dimitrios Papadopoulous. Other speakers came from other institutes across the University of Edinburgh as well as Heriot-Watt University. Topics covered included single molecule imaging, cryo-EM, fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) and even the merits of the chicken as a model organism.

The contribution of ESRIC to the research community was on display throughout with an abundance of the presented data collected using ESRIC instruments.

Two speakers came from further afield. Isuru Jaysinghe of Leeds University presented beautiful super-resolution data of internal structures of cardiac muscle cells. The meeting was concluded with the keynote presentation by Christophe Zimmer of the Pasteur Institute who described how machine-learned image computation can be used to push beyond the limitations of microscopy.

The whole day provided great networking opportunities during the breaks between talk sessions. Hopefully, these will lead to collaborative work that will populate the schedules for the ESRIC symposiums in the years to come.

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