BINA Builder's Workshop Speakers - BioImaging North America Site

December 2 – Bryan A. Millis

Bryan A. Millis
Vanderbilt University

Vanderbilt Page

December 2 – Paul French

Paul French
Physics Department, Imperial College London

Imperial College London Page

December 2 – Nico Stuurman

Nico Stuurman
Center for Advanced Light Microscopy

LinkedIn
Center for Advanced Microscopy Page

April 16 – Jeremy Graham

Jeremy Graham
customScopes

Adopting a hands-on approach, I have a history of expanding business into new technological areas and fostering collaborations with research institutes and partner companies. Skilled in business development, strategy, leadership, and project management, my approach to the job is always to identify how to add value, treating each opportunity as different, and deserving of a unique approach. Having run Cairn Research Ltd. for 20 years, I am now enjoying applying my skills, experience and enthusiasm to building a new company focussing on custom microscope design and support.
I enjoy travel, and have been fortunate to combine this interest with my work, visiting researchers and attending meetings around the world. I am a passionate football fan (Liverpool and Faversham Town), but my surgeon says I should no longer play 😒. I enjoy, festivals, camping, and kayaking – these activities typically involving one or other of my children and their friends.

www.customscopes.co.uk
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-graham-b120721/
https://bsky.app/profile/jez-graham.bsky.social

April 16 – Spencer LaVere Smith

Spencer LaVere Smith
Pacific Optica

Spencer LaVere Smith is a Professor at UC Santa Barbara, and the CEO of Pacific Optica, a company spun out from the lab specializing in laser scanning multiphoton imaging applications. Smith and his group did pioneering work on large field-of-view multiphoton imaging, including open source custom optics such as the Trepan2p (Stirman et al., Nat Biotechnol, 2016), Diesel2p system (Yu et al., Nat Comm 2021), and the Cousa objective (Yu et al., Nat Methods 2024). Recently they introduced a method for multiplying scan angles (Yu et al. Optica 2026). He shares tech notes online (labrigger.com), and runs an academic lab working on neuroscience, optics, and computation.

slslab.org

April 16- Jon Daniels

Jon Daniels
ASI / Applied Scientific Instrumentation

Jon Daniels has formal training in physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering. He has been heavily involved in the world of light sheet during his 13 years at ASI. He enjoys collaborating with scientists around the world to provide tools to advance science, especially when that involves developing something new. Outside of work, Jon is a hobby beekeeper and enjoys spending time outdoors with his family.

April 16 – Hongquan Li

Hongquan Li
Cephla

Hongquan Li is co-founder and CEO of Cephla. During his PhD in Manu Prakash’s lab at Stanford, he led the development of Octopi and Squid microscope platforms – open, automated instruments designed to make powerful imaging more accessible and scalable. Cephla carries that vision forward, further developing both platforms and making them more widely available for basic research, drug discovery, new initiatives and global health applications.

www.cephla.com

May 21 – Kevin Dean

From Altair-LSFM to Altair-dvOPM: Building a Modular Open-Hardware Ecosystem for Smart Light-Sheet Microscopy

Dr. Kevin Dean is an interdisciplinary scientist who develops and applies advanced technologies to understand how tissue function arises from the organization and activity of proteins at subcellular scales. He received his B.A. in Chemistry from Willamette University in 2007 and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2013 under Dr. Amy Palmer. His expertise includes thermodynamics, optical probes, non-linear spectroscopy, microfluidics, advanced microscopy, cell biology, and computer vision. He leads key efforts in two multisite Center Grants: the NCI Cellular Cancer Biology Imaging Research Center, where he is creating an autonomous multiscale microscope to identify and isolate single metastatic cells in cleared tissues, and the NIGMS Biomedical Technology Development and Dissemination Center, where he advances and disseminates cutting-edge light-sheet microscopy techniques. These methods, including Axially Swept Light-Sheet, Field Synthesis, and Oblique Plane Microscopy, enable live cell imaging and reveal new insights into cellular signal transduction via multiplexed biosensors and sophisticated time-series analysis. When not in the lab, he can usually be found chasing after his two young children, ages five and two.

https://www.dean-lab.org/

May 21 – Gail McConnell

New approaches to classical optics for multi-scale bioimaging

Gail McConnell is Professor of Biophotonics at the Strathclyde Institute of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. Following a first degree in Laser Physics and Optoelectronics (1998) and PhD in Physics from the University of Strathclyde (2002), she obtained a Personal Research Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2003) and a Research Councils UK Academic Fellowship (2005), securing a readership in 2008 and professorship in 2012. The work in Gail’s multidisciplinary research group involves the design, development, and application of new light microscopy technologies for biological and biomedical imaging, from the nanoscale to the whole organism. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society, and an Honorary Fellow of the British Biophysical Society.

www.centreforbiophotonics.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gail-mcconnell-a059b99/

May 21 – Alfred Millett-Sikking

Snouty light-sheet microscopy

Alfred Millett-Sikking is a hybrid physicist and engineer fascinated by the notion of optimal designs. He has spent his career assembling expertise in applied physics, optics, mechanics, electronics, and programming to drive innovation in microscopy. As a Senior Staff Engineer at Calico Life Sciences, Alfred has specialized in element- and system-level advancements, most notably through the invention of the AMS-AGY (“Snouty”) objective lens and the development of Any Immersion Remote Refocus (AIRR) microscopy. He is dedicated to improving existing technologies and inventing new ones that bridge the gap between complex optical engineering and practical biological application.

https://calico.github.io/automation-team/

Homepage: https://amsikking.github.io/
linkedin.com/in/amsikking