Eric Betzig, who won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy, will present a public lecture at 4 p.m. on Monday, June 1, titled "Imaging Life at High Spatiotemporal Resolution.” Sponsored by UCLA’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, the lecture will take place in the California Room of UCLA’s Faculty Center and will be followed by a reception.
A Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator, Betzig is a group leader at Janelia Farm Research Campus, HHMI's research center in Ashburn, Virginia, where scientists pursue fundamental neuroscience and imaging research.
As scientific understanding of biological systems has increased, so has the complexity of researchers' questions and the need for more advanced optical tools to answer them. Betzig will describe three areas focused on addressing scientific challenges: super-resolution microscopy for imaging specific proteins within cells at various lengths scales down to near-molecular resolution; plane illumination microscopy using non-diffracting optical lattices for non-invasive imaging of three-dimensional dynamics within live cells and embryos; and adaptive optics to recover optimal images from within large, optically heterogeneous specimens such as zebrafish and cortex of living mice.
The lecture is free, but please RSVP to Carol Canedo by email: carol@chem.ucla.edu.
