Short CV
Ralf Bartenschlager is a virologist and cell biologist working in the field of RNA viruses. He researches the interaction between these viruses and their host cells with a special focus on the replication strategies of RNA viruses and the use of obtained results for development of antiviral therapy. Another focus is the control of viral infection by the innate immune response. The work is mainly performed with hepatitis C virus, dengue virus and SARS-CoV-2 with light and electron microscopic techniques being a central experimental approach in these studies.

Short CV
Sarah Haigh is a Professor of Materials Characterisation at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. She is the Director of bp-International Centre for Advanced Materials (ICAM) and leads projects applying electron microscopy methods for advancing green catalysis. She is Director of the Department of Materials Electron Microscopy Centre, which has 25 instruments and over 500 users. Her research group is centred around improving our understanding of 2D materials and nanoparticle performance using advanced transmission electron microscope (TEM) imaging and analysis techniques. Her group are developing in-situ TEM methodologies and she holds an ERC Starter Grant in this area (EvoluTEM). She has published 4 book chapters, over 200 papers, with >10000 citations since 2016 and has an H-index of 48. Before moving to The University of Manchester in 2010 she worked as consultant application specialist to JEOL UK, and earlier completed MEng and DPhil degrees in Material Science at the University of Oxford. She is a Liveryman of the Armourers and Brasiers Company and sits on their Material Science Committee. She won the IOM3 Silver Medal in 2017 and an RMS Innovation Award in 2018.

Short CV
Dr. Peijun Zhang is a Professor of Structural Biology in the Nuffield Department of Medicine at Oxford University and the founding director of eBIC (the UK National Electron Bio-imaging Centre) at the Diamond Light Source. She obtained B.S. in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Solid State Physics from Nanjing University, and Ph.D. in Biophysics and Physiology from University Virginia. She was a post-doctoral fellow and subsequently a staff scientist at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, and then an Assistant Professor and a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She joined Oxford and Diamond Light Source in 2016. Professor Zhang’s research is aimed at an integrated, atomistic understanding of molecular mechanisms of virus and bacterial infections by developing and combining novel technologies for high-resolution cryoEM and cryo-electron tomography with complementary computational and biophysical/biochemical methods. Her current research efforts focus on HIV-1 capsid assembly, maturation, intracellular trafficking, and nuclear transport. In bacteria, the Zhang laboratory investigates chemotaxis signaling pathways with the long-term goal of mapping out the signaling pathway by assembling the time-resolved structural “snapshots” of signaling states.

Short CV
Mathieu Kociak is researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). After his PhD on superconductivity in carbon nanotubes at the Université Paris Sud, he completed a postdoctoral stay in Meijo University, Japan, where he worked on in situ TEM transport measurements on carbon nanotubes. After a second postdoctoral stay dedicated to magnetic force microscope design in Saclay, he joined the Laboratory for Solid States Physics (LPS) in Orsay as a junior researcher, then as a research director in the STEM group. His main research interests include the study of correlations between the structure, the optical and electronic properties of individual nano-objects, which he approaches through a combination of instrumental developments in electron microscopy, experiments on the STEM and theory of the electron/matter/photon interaction. Mathieu Kociak is currently working especially on nanooptics with fast electrons using EELS and nanocathodoluminescence (STEM-CL). He has transferred his STEM-CL technology to the Attolight company. He has been responsible for the STEM group since July 2021. Mr Kociak is the scientific leader of CHROMATEM, an ultra-high energy resolution electron microscopy project and the deputy director of the french electron microscopy network METSA. Mr Mathieu's awards include the Guinier Prize of the French Physical Society (2002), the quadrennial FEI-EM award (2012) of the European Microscopy Society, the Innovation Prize of the University Paris-Sud (2014) and the Agar Medal of the Royal Society of Microscopy (2015).