Jasper van Leeuwen will be working on dielectric active shimming for his thesis at Mars Lab, supervised by David Maresca and Paulina Šiurytė. The goal of the project is to incorporate remote switching in addition to designing, making, and testing a next-generation device, and if time permits, EM simulations.

Recently researchers of the departments Chemical Engineering and Imaging Physics explored and demonstrated the use of optical coherence tomography (OCT) to measure the spatio-temporal concentration of solute in drying droplets and the development of a solidifying shell at the liquid-air interface, using aqueous droplets of maltodextrin as a model system.

Just before Easter, the Dutch government decided to support the NEXTGEN HIGHTECH programme within the National Growthfund. This is a great boost for the lab of Jacob Hoogenboom and that of Carlas Smith (3mE) to continue their work on electron microscopy, automation, and metrology for life sciences with our partners Technolution Advance, Delmic, and many others.

Anneloes Dijkstra Tyers recently joined ImPhys as Management Assistant. She will be supporting the Microscopy Instrumentation & Techniques group (MInT). Anneloes graduated in 2011 from Van Hall Larenstein in Wageningen with a degree in Regional Development and Innovation.

A paper is out in Physical Review Research by a collaboration between Sjoerd Stallinga and researchers in Grenoble and Gottingen on the question what the best possible transfer function is for a band-limited imaging system such as fluorescence based microscopes.

Koen Jurgens is a Molecular and Cellular Life Sciences Msc student from Utrecht University, track Biophysics & Molecular Imaging. He will 3D print phase plates to engineer the point spread function, and consecutively evaluate the performances to optimize the design of these phase plates. His supervisor is Bernd Rieger.

Metastases in cancer are often caused by a few abnormal cells. These behave more aggressively than the other cancer cells in a tumour. Miao-Ping Chien and Daan Brinks are working together, from two different universities, on a method to detect these cells. Their research has now been published in Nature.

Rui Silva completed his master in Bioengineering (Biomedical Engineering) in Porto, Portugal. He is doing a PhD, in a collaboration between Erasmus MC in Rotterdam and the Daan Brinks lab at ImPhys. Rui’s research will focus on in vivo voltage imaging.

Medicine is becoming increasingly personalised. One-size-fits-all approaches make way for tailor-made treatments, for instance for cancer and cardiovascular disease. In the 4TU Precision Medicine programme, scientists are working towards this goal by improving medical imaging technologies in a fruitful interaction between science and clinical practice.

What does this entail and how can we assess whether students acquired the associated knowledge? These are questions addressed in our paper "Defining and assessing understandings of evidence with the assessment rubric for physics inquiry: Towards integration of argumentation and inquiry". The premise of this study is that an inquiry comes down to the building of a scientifically cogent argument where each decision and action undertaken is substantiated.