Postdoctoral Scientists

At the HCNB, I leverage my background in optical coherence, interference, and microscopy to develop novel technologies for non-invasively studying the mechanobiology of cells and small model organisms. Notably, I am engineering ways to boost the speed and resolution of force microscopy and using Brillouin microscopy to measure the stiffness of cells.

Dr Junho Kim

Gather Lab

Postdoctoral scientist

email

Junho.Kim(at)uni-koeln(dot)de

phone

+49 221 470-76453

room

203

Dr-Ing. habil. Lucas Kreiss Roohian

Gather Lab

Postdoctoral scientist

website

email

Lucas.Kreiss(at)uni-koeln(dot)de

phone

+49 221 470-76452

room

302a

details

"My research develops label-free optical technologies and interpretable computation to read out the functional and molecular state of living tissue, without cutting, staining, or fixing it. Light carries the information; computation turns it into biomedical knowledge.

I develop deep learning models that recover molecular specificity from label-free optical imaging (1), notably with SEMPAI (2), predicting pathology, function, and genetic background from second-harmonic images, and within my EU-funded project MICS (3), classifying immune cell subtypes (4) and tissue-level inflammation from autofluorescence and SHG. In parallel, massively parallelized diffuse correlation spectroscopy (5) enabled the first robust functional measurements of cerebral blood flow at several centimetres depth.

At the HCNB, this continues into quantitative phase and polarimetric imaging (QP²I) resolving sarcomere-level mechanics in live cardiomyocytes. Together, this effort always aims at co-designing label-free optics with interpretable computation to discover new insights across immune, vascular, and mechanical biology."

Dr Nils Kronenberg

Gather Lab

Postdoctoral scientist

website

email

Nils.Kronenberg(at)uni-koeln(dot)de

phone

+49 221 470-76454

room

301a

details

"My research activities at the HCNB are focused on cell force microscopy. We have developed an interference-based microscopy technique, dubbed ERISM, which allows us to measure mechanical forces exerted by cells with piconewton precision and micrometre lateral resolution. I now help to apply this technique to broaden our understanding of the involvement of mechanics in cellular processes, e.g. during kidney damage, cancer cell invasion, neuronal differentiation, dyslexia or mechanosensing."