Dr. Paul Wiseman developed image correlation spectroscopy, a new microscopy technique allowing to quantify protein clusters distribution, during his graduate studies with Nils Petersen at the University of Western Ontario. After post-doctoral positions in Japan with Professor Akihiro Kusumi, and at UCSD with Profs. Kent Wilson and Jeff Squier, he returned to Canada in 2001 to start his own research group at McGill University, where he has pursued the development of new quantitative microscopy tools to unlock hidden properties of biomolecules.

Dr. Wiseman’s impressive body of work includes several seminal contributions to fluorescence microscopy and imaging of molecules in living cells. Him and his group at McGill have developed and applied different image correlation spectroscopy modalities, notably spatio-temporal image correlation spectroscopy (STICS), which extend correlation microscopy into the realm of flow and provide velocity maps for molecules undergoing directed movement in living cells. By providing high-resolution maps of protein interactions, transport and oligomerization states in vivo, these methods have had a tremendous impact in the fields of cell biology and cellular biophysics.

Dr. Wiseman’s excellence has been recognized by many prestigious awards, notably the Otto Maass Chair in Chemistry at McGill, the Biophysical Society’s Young Fluorescence Investigator Award, a CIFAR Research Fellowship, and a Fulbright Visiting Chair in Nanoscience at UCLA. His research has received support from NSERC, NIH, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and the Human Frontiers Science Program, amongst others.

In addition to his research accomplishments, Dr. Wiseman has made substantial contributions to the academic community, notably through his commitment to fostering interdisciplinary collaborations. He has mentored numerous graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, who are now successfully employed in academia and industry in Canada, USA, Germany, India, Australia, and the UK.

Dr. Justin MacCallum received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Calgary, where he worked with Dr. Peter Tieleman on small molecule computer simulations. After post-doctoral work at UCSF and Stony Brook University, he came back to the University of Calgary in 2014, where he currently holds the Canada Research Chair in Biomolecular Structure and Design.

His interdisciplinary approach, combining computer science and experimental biophysics, has paved the way for a deeper understanding of complex biological processes via new approaches to structure determination. His work transcends traditional biophysical research, seamlessly integrating theoretical, computational, and wet-laboratory-based techniques to establish an integrative structural biology program aimed at enhancing our understanding of protein structure and functions.

His pioneering work has been featured in prestigious journals including Science, Nature Microbiology, Angewandte Chemie, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Science Advances. In addition to the Canada Research Chair program, Dr. MacCallum’s research endeavours have received support from NSERC, CIHR, and CFI programs. He boasts an impressive track record of mentoring trainees, actively participating in outreach activities, and generously contributing his expertise to the scientific community. In recognition of his early career success, he was honoured with the University of Calgary Faculty of Science Early Career Research Award in 2020.

Jan Behrends studied Medicine at the University of Munich. During his studies, he conducted research at Kyushu University, Japan. Dr. Behrends went on to do postdoctoral appointments at the Institute Pasteur in Paris and at the Max-Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Martinsried. He joined the faculty at the University of Munich and later moved to the University of Freiburg, where he is Professor of Physiology and heads the Laboratory for Membrane Physiology and Technology. Dr. Behrends focusses his research on electrophysiological techniques and most recently nanopore-based bioanalytics, and he is renowned for his development of novel experimental tools for electrophysiology and nanoscience.

His success in developing new technologies led to Dr. Behrends co-founding Nanion Technologies (2002), one of the leading manufacturers of automated patch clamp devices as well as Ionera Technologies (2014), a purveyor of chip-based systems to study synthetic membranes. He is a member of the Center for Nanoscience at the University of Munich, co-director of the federally funded Cluster4Future nanodiag BW and director of nEOdiag, a funded in the Carl-Zeiss-Foundation’s Breakthrough programme. by the Carl-Zeiss Foundation.

Dr. Behrends received a number of awards and honors. He shared the Genius Biotech Award Baden Württemberg and the German Founder’s Award, as well as the Innovation Award of the City of Freiburg and was a finalist of the Future Prize of the German Federal President.

Ibrahim Cissé, born in Niger, earned his physics PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009. Following a postdoctoral stint at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, he returned to the USA in 2013 as a Research Specialist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus. In 2014, he joined MIT in Boston, progressing from assistant to associate professor in the Physics Department with a joint appointment in biology. In 2021, he became a Physics Professor at the California Institute of Technology before joining MPI of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg.

Cissé, the recipient of multiple awards, including the 2021 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science, combines physics, biology, and chemistry to investigate genetic information decoding and biomolecular phase transitions in living cells. Using super-resolution imaging, he and his team analyze molecular events during gene expression, visualizing clusters of molecules forming and dissolving rapidly.

Dr. Andrea Liu received her PhD from Cornell University in 1989 and went on to do postdoctoral appointments at Exxon and the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1993, she started a faculty position at UCLA and in 2004, she moved to the University of Pennsylvania. In 2009, she became the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor in the Natural Sciences, and became Hepburn Professor of Physics in 2011. She is also the current Director for the Center for Soft and Living Matter.

Dr. Liu is a world-class researcher in condensed matter and biophysics, known for being one of the first scientists to describe the microscopic properties of the jamming transition, in which rigidity appears in particles that pack in a disordered manner. More recently, she has explored the applications of artificial intelligence techniques to soft matter systems and the applications of soft matter systems to artificial intelligence techniques. She has received a number of awards and honors, including Member of the National Academy of Sciences, Simons Investigator in Theoretical Physics, Fellow of American Association for the advancement of Science, Member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Dr. Liu has published over 150 articles in a wide range of fields, and she has been cited over 20,000 times.