Medical Engineering Distinguished Seminar Series, Professor Eric Betzig

Life is the most complex matter in the known universe. Despite centuries of study, our understanding of even single cells remains primitive, and each of us is comprised of trillions of such cells, each unaware of the larger whole. Our best path forward remains observation, yet many of our most powerful tools are reductionist, and thus ill-suited to unraveling the complex 4D dynamics between millions of heterogeneous components within each cell. Trained as a physicist at Caltech, I have spent my career as a microscope builder trying to understand life on its own terms. Frustration with the limits of each tool has inspired the next, in a long twisting path of gradually increasing understanding and appreciation of the awe-inspiring beauty and complexity of living systems. I will describe this journey, as well as where I believ we must go next to expand the frontier of our understanding.

Biography: Eric Betzig 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. A Caltech alum, 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 1994 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. His current interest involves unraveling the 5D subcellular dynamics within living multicellular organisms using adaptive optical lattice light sheet microscopy, and developing scalable machine learning tools to extract human-interpretable insights from the resulting petabyte-scale 5D data. https://www.janelia.org/lab/betzig-lab