ZEISS at Microscopy & Microanalysis (M&M) 2024

Nabil Bassim is a Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at McMaster University and the Scientific Director of the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy (CCEM – ccem.mcmaster.ca).

His research focuses on the development of novel electron microscopy, ion microscopy, and lithography techniques, including understanding the role of damage and doping in the manufacturing of novel nanostructured materials. He also serves as the Scientific Director of the CCEM, a CFI-funded Major Science Initiatives National User Facility that is home to the most advanced, cutting edge analytical characterization tools in Canada. Besides studying ion-sample interactions, beam scanning strategies, machine learning-based optimization strategies, and material deposition for microscale additive processes, he also applies these techniques to a diverse set of materials, ranging from structural materials such as cement, concrete, and steel to nanomaterials and two-dimensional materials. He is the author of two major review articles on focused ion beam (FIB) and is the co-founder and co-organizer of the FIB-SEM User Meeting (www.fibsem.net), which is the largest FIB conference in North America. He also serves as the Faculty lead for McMaster Engineering’s Aerospace and Defense Initiative.

Dr. Jean-Charles Stinville holds a Ph.D. in Solid Mechanics, Materials Science, and Mechanical Engineering and an aerospace engineering degree from French Grande Ecoles. In 2012, he joined the Materials Department at the University of California Santa Barbara and became a Research Specialist in 2015. As a research specialist, he has led efforts around the experimental development of in-situ characterization techniques for metallic materials' deformation identification. He holds appointments in the Materials Science and Engineering Department and the Materials Research Laboratory as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His group designs sustainable and high-performance alloys for applications in extreme environments. In addition, they develop advanced experimental and numerical tools to tailor materials at the nano- to micrometer scales to improve their performances.

Dr. Kaushik Yanamandra is an Applications Development Engineer at Zeiss Microscopy. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from New York University and later worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Materials Science Department at Purdue University. His expertise lies in the materials characterization of metals and composite materials.
Kaushik’s research has focused on developing lightweight advanced materials for dynamic loading conditions. He has extensively utilized microscopy techniques, such as Scanning Electron Microscopy and X-ray Microscopy, to investigate the mechanical behavior of materials through their microstructure. Additionally, he has developed machine learning algorithms to enhance the speed and efficiency of materials characterization. His work also includes implementing machine learning models for defect detection in 3D-printed products, addressing the security challenges posed by additively manufactured materials.

Stefan Zaefferer studied physical metallurgy and metal physics at the Technical University Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany, in the famous texture lab headed by Prof. H.J. Bunge. He also received his PhD from the same place for a work on transmission electron microscopy on Ti-alloys. He then spend three years as a researcher at the University Paris XII in Paris, France, and two years at Kyoto University, Japan. Since 2000 he leads the group “Microscopy and Diffraction” at the Max-Planck-Institute for Iron Research in Düsseldorf, Germany, and is lecturer for materials characterization at RWTH Aachen University. He also teaches regularly at Vienna University. At all his research positions Dr. Zaefferer was involved with the development and application of techniques for individual orientation determination and lattice defect characterization, first by TEM techniques and then, most prominently, by SEM techniques. Besides development of diffraction techniques his research interests are the mechanisms of microstructure formation in metals and other materials, including deformation, recrystallization and phase transformation. Stefan Zaefferer is author or co-author of about 150 journal papers. He is co-author together with Olaf Engler and Valerie Randle of the 3rd edition of the book “Introduction to Texture Analysis” published in 2024.

Dr. Chih-Wei Logan Hsu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology and the Academic Director of the Optical Imaging and Vital Microscopy Core at Baylor College of Medicine. With 18 years of experience in biomedical research, Dr. Hsu focuses on advancing high-throughput 3D imaging techniques to address biomedical questions related to mouse embryo development, cardiovascular science, and human diseases. Since 2014, Dr. Hsu has been providing experimental consultation, training, and instruction in tissue clearing, light-sheet microscopy, and X-ray micro-CT imaging to researchers at all levels across the Texas Medical Center.

Dr. Hsu is actively transforming newly developed sample preparation strategies and imaging techniques, such as contrast-enhanced micro-CT for soft tissue imaging and tissue clearing with organ whole-mount light-sheet imaging, into core training services. Over the past ten years, Dr. Hsu has supervised the NIH-funded Knockout Mouse Project (KOMP2) Embryonic Lethal Micro-CT Phenotyping and Adult SD-OCT Eye Morphology Pipelines at Baylor College of Medicine, as part of the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC). He has streamlined the use of iodine-contrast micro-CT for 3D morphological and anatomical analysis of mouse embryo and neonate development, phenotyping over 4,500 embryos across 320 single-gene knockout lethal or sub-viable mouse lines. This work has contributed to six IMPC consortium publications and five collaborative manuscripts. For the Adult Eye Morphology Pipeline, Dr. Hsu's team has phenotyped an average of 1,500 mice per year across 670+ mouse lines using SD-OCT, identifying genes required for eye development.Additionally, Dr. Hsu collaborates with and supports the Center of Precision Medicine Models (CPMM) for mouse embryo micro-CT phenotyping and the Somatic Cell Genome Editing Consortium (SCGE) in developing tissue clearing and whole-mount imaging protocols to quantify the frequency of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in targeted tissues and detect rare off-target editing events in other tissues.

Dr. Spirou studied physics and philosophy as an undergraduate student, received his doctoral degree in Neuroscience/ Neurophysiology from the University of Florida, and completed fellowship training in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He began his tenure-track career at West Virginia University, where he was Director of Research, Otolaryngology. He was then appointed inaugural Director of the Center for Neuroscience, a campus-wide structure to integrate all basic and translational neuroscience research, and was selected to be the John W. and Jeannnette S. Straton Chair of Neuroscience. He later moved to the University of South Florida, joining the newly formed Department of Medical Engineering. Dr. Spirou’s research is funded by the NIH, and is directed at two topics: early brain development and mapping neural circuits. Both research areas utilize modern approaches to large-scale, high-resolution imaging of brain structure and neural dynamics. Dr. Spirou has maintained an interest in 3D visualization of 3D and 4D structures, and is co-founder of a startup company, syGlass, Inc., which makes software for visualization, analysis and communication of big data using virtual reality.

Product Applications and Sales Specialist, Life Science Electron and X-ray Microscopy, North America

Steven began his career at Zeiss in February 2023. His interest in electron microscopy led him to various exciting roles, including the lead SEM microscopist in an academic core facility, in process engineering with photomask repair at Intel’s D1B fab in Hillsboro, and as a senior failure analysis engineer of medical devices with Medtronic in Tempe