Medical Engineering Distinguished Seminar Series, Professor Eric Betzig

Eric Betzig is an American physicist who won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for using fluorescent molecules to bypass the inherent resolution limit in optical microscopy. He is a Professor of Molecular and Cell biology, the Eugene D. Commins Presidential Chair in Experimental Physics, a Senior Fellow at the Janelia Research Campus, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.  His Ph.D. thesis at Cornell University and subsequent work at AT&T Bell Labs involved the development of near-field optics – an early form of super-resolution microscopy.  He left academia in 1995 to work in the machine tool industry, but returned ten years later when he and friend, Harald Hess, built the first super-resolution single molecule localization microscope in Harald's living room.  For this work, he is a co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  Today, he continues to develop new imaging tools to aid in biological discovery, including correlative super-resolution fluorescence and electron microscopy, 4D dynamic imaging of living systems with non-diffracting light sheets, and adaptive optical microscopy to recover optimal imaging performance deep within aberrating multicellular specimens. https://physics.berkeley.edu/people/faculty/eric-betzig