How do researchers change the world we live in?

Three challengers. Three stories. One microscopy system.

We asked three pioneers in science how they push boundaries of discovery, influence our lives and the entire planet.

What problem are they working on right now? How does their work influence the world? What motivates them?

Prof. Moritz Helmstaedter, Dr. Julia Fernandez-Rodriguez and Dr. Ali Gholinia research different sides of life but all benefit from the power of the same world's fastest scanning electron microscopes - ZEISS MultiSEM. And they all work to empower a distributed research infrastructure for Ultra-Fast 2D/3D Imaging in life and material sciences in Europe.

Prof. Moritz Helmstaedter

Moritz Helmstaedter was born in Berlin in 1978. He studied medicine and physics at Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg and later had a brief interlude as strategy consultant with McKinsey. He has received numerous honors for his research activities and is a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and Director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. Additional appointments include Professor (Chair, extraordinary professor) for Neuronal Networks at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands.

Find out more about brain research at the Max Planck Institute

Dr. Julia Fernandez-Rodriguez

Head of the National Centre for Cellular Imaging at the University of Gothenburg, along with being the Head of the Correlative Array Tomography Unit at the SciLifeLab Infrastructure and co-Director of the National Microscopy Infrastructure, is also Vice-chair of the Panels of Node Board for the Euro-BioImaging-ERIC consortium and President of the Core Technologies for Life Sciences Association. With more than 22 years of experience on research infrastructure, managing facilities and training activities at the National and International level. Her main interest is in providing expertise in correlated multimodal imaging workflows for various research domains within the Life Sciences.

Find out more about Core Facilities at the University of Gothenburg

Dr. Ali Gholinia

Dr. Ali Gholinia is a Research Fellow in the Department of Materials at the University of Manchester, with over 20 years of experience in electron microscopy. His expertise includes materials characterization and processing, and he has worked on the development of electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) technique and its applications. His current research focus is on 3D correlative and multi-modal microstructure characterization of materials using X-ray computed tomography and serial sectioning techniques in SEM, as well as linking materials microstructure and mechanical properties using in-situ tensile deformation in SEM.