Date and time: Friday 5 December 2025, 10:00-11:00 CET
Speaker: Qionghai Dai, Tsinghua University
Title: Mesoscale Intravital Fluorescence Microscopy
Where: Digital Futures hub, Osquars Backe 5, floor 2 at KTH main campus OR Zoom
Directions: https://www.digitalfutures.kth.se/contact/how-to-get-here/
OR
Zoom: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/69560887455
Host: Arvind Kumar arvkumar@kth.se
Bio: Qionghai Dai is a Professor at Tsinghua University, the Academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering, Dean of the School of Information Science and Technology, and the director of the Institute of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University. He is also the chairman of Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence. Qionghai’s research centers on the interdisciplinary study of optics, informatics, neuroscience, and cognitive sciences, with hundreds of journal papers published in Cell, Nature, Science, etc.
Specifically, he has pioneered the development of mesoscale imaging systems and data analysis methods, facilitating simultaneous multi-scale intravital observation of biological dynamics spanning from organelles, cells, tissue, and organs in different pathological or physiological states at a system level. He is now working on system neuroscience, artificial intelligence, computational imaging, large-scale data analysis methods, and neuromorphic optoelectronic devices.
Abstract: Biology is a typical discipline covering multiple scales. While cryo-EM and super-resolution imaging enables intracellular imaging of proteins and organelles in microscale, CT and MRI facilitates organ-level imaging in macroscale at tissue resolution. There has long been a missing gap of imaging instruments in mesoscale to observe the large-scale interactions of cells in the native mammalian environment during diverse pathological and physiological states.
In this talk, I will introduce our recent developed techniques such as scanning light field microscopy (Wu et al. 2021 Cell), digital adaptive optics (Wu et al. 2022 Nature), two-photon synthetic aperture microscopy (Zhao et al. 2023 Cell), confocal scanning light-field imaging (Lu et al. 2024 Nature Biotechnology) to overcome the barriers of intravital imaging, with orders of magnitude improvement in spatiotemporal resolution, imaging data throughput, and orders of magnitude reduction in phototoxicity for long-term observations (Zhang et al. 2024 Cell).
We believe the rapid development of mesoscale imaging opens up a new horizon for the study of large-scale intercellular interactions in mammals, facilitating diverse applications in neuroscience, immunology, oncology, and medicine. While we have exploited some preliminary applications, we believe there is a great treasure awaits discovery.
