4D Life Sciences Seminar

Fabian Voigt is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

He studied Interdisciplinary Sciences at ETH Zürich and received his PhD in 2019 from the Universität Zürich. During his PhD work in the Laboratory of Neural Circuit Dynamics of Fritjof Helmchen, he developed the mesoscale selective plane illumination (mesoSPIM) Initiative, a global open science project aiming to provide the imaging community with better light-sheet microscopes for imaging cm-sized cleared tissue samples. Since 2021, Fabian Voigt is a HFSP postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Florian Engert at Harvard University and working on improving whole-brain imaging techniques in larval zebrafish.

Seeing is believing and thus, optical imaging techniques are extremely useful to study brain structure and function. In his talk 'Expanding the bag of optical tricks for neuroscience' Fabian Voigt talked about three projects aimed at providing the neuroscience community with better imaging instrumentation: These range from open-source light-sheet microscopes for imaging cleared tissue (mesoSPIM); novel multi-immersion microscope objectives that take inspiration from scallops and astronomical telescopes; and establishing event-based vision as an imaging modality that allows high-speed recordings of physiology and behavior over long time periods without generating overly large datasets.