On 25 & 26 November 2021 the first annual meeting of the Dutch inverse problems community will be held. Jeroen Kalkman is one of the invited speakers and he will talk about imaging challenges in optical tomography. Eric Verschuur and Koen van Dongen are members of the organizing committee.

Ali Mohammadi-Gheidari and Jacob Hoogenboom received a HTSM top-sector funding of € 534.000 for their project: “MEMS-based optics components for high-resolution electron/ion microscopy”. They will study the electron optics performance of designed and fabricated components both experimentally and via computer simulations, including study of the interaction of energetic electrons with the micron- and nanoscale patterned features that form the functional units in the MEMS-components (Roadmap Nanotechnology).

Last week, the IEEE-UFFC-S Special topic school on Waves and Transducers started. Thirty “students” with a back-ground varying from astrophysics to biomedical ultrasound, from theoreticians to experimentalists, from academia to industry have gathered together to follow this special topic school. ⁠

Pieter will conduct his PhD research as an external student of the ImPhys department at the RNA Therapeutics Institute of the UMass Medical School. He will focus on gathering, processing and analyzing microscopic single-molecule data. The goal is to conduct molecular research that enables the rapid application of new biological discoveries to solutions for unmet challenges in human health.

As part of the final projects of our introductory lab course, students conceived experiments related to the umbrella topic of 'Physics of toys and sports' and carried out the experiments at their homes. This paper revisits two of these experiments described by student teams and illustrates how self-conceived experiments provide opportunities to truly engage students in doing science.

Jordan Gotti joined Imphys from the industrial biotechnology university of Milano Bicocca. She will join the lab of Daan Brinks for a master project and work on a project characterizing expression patterns of voltage sensors in zebrafish embryos.

Léon van Velzen is currently following the Applied Physics master with a focus on instrumentation. The coming months he hopes to contribute to the research group by using software to model the aberration corrected SEM currently being built by Diederik Maas. On this topic he will write his master thesis.

Maurice Krielaart (ImPhys) has been awarded a coveted Rubicon grant by NWO.

Haoyang Yin will be doing his Master project in the optics group for the next half year. His supervisors are Silvania Pereira and Dmytro Kolenov. Haoyang will be working on the coherent Fourier scatterometry setup for particle detection. The idea is to add a movable reference mirror in order to retrieve phase information and boost the signal to noise ratio of the scan.

Thijs van den Brink will be doing his MEP on the Nano-aperture Ion Source under the supervision of Pieter Kruit. He will mainly be focusing on the simulation of the gas flow of the possible chip configurations. The modeling is done using a direct simulation Monte Carlo code.