ACMM29
1st - 4th February 2027
Plenary Speakers
Professor Jian-Min Zuo
From Atomic Structure to Chemical Bonding: Resolving Complexity with Electron Microscopy
Prof. Zuo is the Director of Monash Centre for Electron Microscopy, Australia. Prior joining Monash, he was the Racheff Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The research in Prof. Zuo's group involves the development and application of advanced electron microscopy for the study of structure-property relationships for novel materials characterization. He is a Fellow of American Physical Society and Microscopy Society of America and the recipient of Gjonnes Award for electron crystallography of International Union of Crystallography. He authored two books with Prof. John Spence on Advanced Transmission Electron Microscopy, Springer 2017, and Electron microdiffraction, Plenum, 1992.
Professor David Muller
Electron Ptychography Comes of Age
David Muller is the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University, and co-director of the Cornell Center for Materials Research and the Kavli Institute for Nanoscale Science at Cornell. Muller received his BSc degree from the University of Sydney, his PhD degree in physics from Cornell, and was a research scientist at Bell Labs from 1997-2003. His research interests include new electron microscopy methods for the atomic-scale control and characterization of matter. His group holds the Guinness World Record for the highest resolution microscope.
He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Microscopy Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Some of his awards include the APS Keithley Award, the Microscopy Society of America’s Burton Medal, the International Federation of Societies for Microscopy’s Cowley Medal, and the Ernst Ruska prize from the German Society for Electron Microscopy.
Professor Peijun Zhang
In Situ Chromatin Dynamics and HIV-1 Nuclear Transport
Peijun Zhang is Professor of Structural Biology in the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford and the founding Director of eBIC, the UK National Electron Bio-imaging Centre, at Diamond Light Source. Her research aims to achieve an integrated understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying human pathogen infection, particularly in the native cellular context, through the development and application of novel high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy (cryoEM) and cryo-electron tomography (cryoET) technologies. Her current research focuses on HIV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 infection using multi-scale correlative and integrative in situ structural biology, as well as bacterial chemotaxis signalling studied through time-resolved cryoEM and cryoET. She earned her PhD at the University of Virginia, completed postdoctoral training at the NIH, and served as an Assistant Professor and subsequently tenured Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine before joining the University of Oxford. She has received numerous awards, including a recent Wellcome Trust Discovery Award, and was elected a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).
Professor Franz Giessibl
Quantum Measurements at the Picoscale with Combined Atomic Force- and Scanning Tunneling Microscopy
Franz Josef Gießibl is renowned for his groundbreaking contributions to atomic force microscopy (AFM) and nanoscience. He studied physics at Technical University of Munich and the ETH Zurich. Franz earned his Ph.D. in experimental physics under Nobel laureate Gerd Binnig, one of the inventors of the scanning tunneling microscope.
Professor Gießibl is internationally recognized for advancing atomic force microscopy from a promising laboratory technique into a powerful tool capable of imaging surfaces with atomic and even subatomic resolution. During the 1990s, he developed frequency-modulation AFM methods that enabled the first atomic-resolution images of reactive surfaces such as silicon. He later invented the qPlus sensor, a highly sensitive quartz-based force sensor that became a key component in modern high-resolution AFM systems worldwide.
After research positions at the IBM and in industry, as well as a period at McKinsey & Company, he returned to academia and completed his habilitation at University of Augsburg. Since 2006, he has served as Professor and Chair of Experimental and Applied Physics at University of Regensburg, where he leads research in quantum nanoscience, surface physics, and advanced microscopy.
