Miriam Menzel joined ImPhys as Assistant Professor

Disentangling the highly complex and densely grown network of nerve fibers is key to understanding the structure and function of the brain. Computational scattered light imaging is a highly promising new imaging technique that resolves nerve fiber pathways and their crossings with micrometer resolution. While other scattering techniques raster-scan the tissue with a light beam and measure the distribution of scattered light behind the sample, this new technique uses a reverse setup: The whole tissue section is illuminated from many different angles and the normally transmitted light is measured, thus enabling much higher resolutions and requiring only standard optical components (LED light source and camera). The Menzel lab on computational scattered light imaging will further develop this technique in order to resolve complex fiber structures, and also exploit applications beyond neuroscience.

Biography: Dr. Miriam Menzel studied Physics at RWTH Aachen University (Germany) and Imperial College London (UK) with focus on theoretical solid state physics, biophotonics, and medical imaging. In 2013, she joined the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine at Research Center Jülich (Germany), where she started working on optics simulations of polarization microscopy of brain tissue. After completing her PhD in 2018 with distinction, she changed her focus to the experimental development of new light microscopy techniques for brain research, exploiting the scattering of visible light to visualize complex brain tissue structures. As visiting postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford School of Medicine (USA), she compared light and X-ray scattering in brain tissue. Dr. Menzel is Klaus Tschira Boost Fellow and Delft Technology Fellow. In October 2022, she became Assistant Professor at the Department of Imaging Physics, TU Delft, and founded a lab for computational scattered light imaging.