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. 

Cristina is a Biomedical Engineering Master student in the Medical Physics track. She is working on the Fourier decomposition MRI for pediatric lung diseases under supervision of Frans Vos.

Amerens recently started her graduation project for the MSc Biomedical Engineering, track Medical Physics. She will focus on the image reconstruction and processing of intravascular ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging to improve lipid detection in atherosclerotic coronary arteries and will be supervised by Rik Vos.

Tom van Lieshout is currently doing his masters degree in applied physics after finishing his bachelors, also at the TU Delft. He will be doing his master thesis @ImPhys under supervison of Koen van Dongen. Tom will be working on using finite difference time domain methods to model elastic waves in the walls of a blast furnace (like the ones used at TATA steel), with the goal to later move to the inverse problem!

Per February 2022, Omar El Gawhary, from the Optics group of ImPhys, has been appointed as member of the Council of Experts on National Measurement Standards (Raad van deskundigen van de nationale meetstandaarden).

Last week we received our trainings by Delmic on the new FAST-EM, over 20-years long TU Delft developments culminating in an exciting new microscope. The FAST-EM was developed together with TU Delft and other industry partners; Technolution and Thermo Fisher Scientific. This microscope is able to acquire high resolution images of biological specimens much quicker than previously possible, which could be considered a big milestone for our research field.