News

Ursula Keller wins “Swiss Nobel” Marcel Benoist Prize- for pioneering work in ultrafast lasers
MUST2022 Conference- a great success!
New scientific highlights- by MUST PIs Wörner, Chergui, and Richardson
FELs of Europe prize for Jeremy Rouxel- “Development or innovative use of advanced instrumentation in the field of FELs”
Ruth Signorell wins Doron prizefor pioneering contributions to the field of fundamental aerosol science
New FAST-Fellow Uwe Thumm at ETH- lectures on Topics in Femto- and Attosecond Science
International Day of Women and Girls in Science- SSPh asked female scientists about their experiences
New scientific highlight- by MUST PIs Milne, Standfuss and Schertler
EU XFEL Young Scientist Award for Camila Bacellar,beamline scientist and group leader of the Alvra endstation at SwissFEL
Prizes for Giulia Mancini and Rebeca Gomez CastilloICO/IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics & Ernst Haber 2021
Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to RESOLV Member Benjamin List- for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis
NCCR MUST at Scientifica 2021- Lightning, organic solar cells, and virtual molecules

ERC Starting Grant for Ulrich Lorenz

erc-lorenz
Visualizing the Conformational Dynamics of Proteins by Time-Resolved Electron Microscopy

Ulrich Lorenz is a junior PI in MUST. Since March 1, 2016, he has an Assistant Professorship at EPFL that is sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation. On June 1, he was appointed Tenure Track Assistant Professor. He studied Chemistry at the University of Würzburg, straying very briefly into Metal Organic Chemistry, before discovering his interest in Molecular Physics. During his Ph.D. in the group of Prof. Thomas Rizzo at EPFL, he worked on the spectroscopy and dynamics of cryogenic molecular ions in the gas-phase, which included a fair share of instrument development. For his postdoc in the group of Prof. Ahmed Zewail at Caltech, he switched to the field of Time-resolved Electron Microscopy, studying the dynamics of nanoscale systems.

A summary of his ERC-project: "The function of many proteins involves large-amplitude domain motions that occur on a timescale of microseconds to millisecond. In the absence of tools to directly observe these dynamics, our understanding of the function of proteins is necessarily incomplete and must frequently rely on extrapolation from known static structures. The project involves the implementation of real-time imaging of single particle dynamics in liquid phase with both microsecond time resolution as well as near-atomic spatial resolution. The experimental approach builds on several recent technological advances, namely the advent of Time-Resolved (“Four-Dimensional”) Electron Microscopy, in-situ Electron Microscopy, and direct electron detection cameras, which are combined with established single-particle reconstruction techniques in cryo-Electron Microscopy. Visualizing the conformational dynamics of proteins will fundamentally advance our understanding of these nanoscale machines and has the potential to greatly benefit biomedical applications."


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