MSI Annual Symposium hosted by CRANN

A “great success” was how Dr Hongzhou Zhang, CRANN PI, described the Annual Symposium of the Microscopy Society of Ireland (MSI), which concluded on Friday last, 26th August, in Trinity College Dublin (TCD). The scientific and social programme included keynote speeches, workshops, trade and poster sessions and a pub crawl of the local hostelries and ran over three days. The 35th MSI's Annual Symposium was hosted by CRANN at TCD.

The MSI is a multi-disciplinary, all-island learned society which concerns itself with all aspects of microscopy. All traditional and emerging methods of microscopy, and their applications, were considered at the Symposium, including nanomaterials and nanodevices and Electron and Helium-ion Microscopy, providing researchers and students an opportunity to learn more about state of the art techniques and new developments in microscopy by leading experts. Keynote speakers included Prof Angus Kirkland from Oxford University, Dr Paul Verkade from the University of Bristol and Prof Brian Ford from the University of Cambridge.

A public lecture was hosted by Prof Brian J. Ford on “Recreating the Dawn of Microscopy‟ as part of the Symposium. His talk revealed that the microscopy pioneers were actually able to obtain remarkably detailed views, with instruments even from the 1600s providing sub-micron resolution. The results he presented were recently presented at the Royal Society, and they gave the audience, for the first time, access to the images that were seen by the first microscopists. Prof. Brian J Ford is, in the words of Nature last month, “the world‟s leading expert” in his field and a search for "microscope research" on Google shows him to be top in the world out of some 20,000,000 sites.

Dr Diarmuid O’Brien, Executive Director of CRANN, speaking at the conference said, “I am delighted to welcome the MSI’s Annual Symposium to CRANN and to facilitate discussion and cooperation around microscopy between academic and industrial attendees. The microscopy facilities and expertise at CRANN’s AML has enriched the quality of our nanoscience research, contributing to Ireland’s rank of 6th in the world for this research. It has also allowed us to continue to attract and work with multinational companies like Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Merck Millipore among others”.

He continued, “Nanoscience has a huge role to play in Ireland’s economic recovery, with 10% of national exports enabled by nanotechnology. In just 12 months, the AML has helped our researchers to win €5 million in non-exchequer funding. The facility is a unique, national asset and we welcome Symposium delegates to visit the AML”

The conference’s local organising committee was chaired by Dr Hongzhou Zhang who joined CRANN as a Principal Investigator in 2009. Dr. Zhang recently achieved a milestone in the imaging of colorectal cancer cells worldwide. His team used the Helium Ion Microscope at CRANN’s AML to image the cells and had their work published in the prestigious Journal of Microscopy, with the images used as the cover image for the journal. Dr Zhang holds a Stokes Lecturer position in the School of Physics, TCD.

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