SFBS 2026 – New speakers are revealed
The SFBS 2026 Scientific Symposium, hosted in Bordeaux from October 19 to 21, 2026, will be dedicated to super-resolution and advanced microscopy. On this occasion, renowned international experts will share their latest research and exchange with attendees on their vision of the field.
After presented Francisco Balzarotti, Liangyi Chen and Lydia Danglot, we introduce three new speakers: Wulan Deng, Makus Sauer, Baohui Chen.
Wulan Deng
Dr. Wulan Deng is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Biomedical Pioneering Innovation Center (BIOPIC) and the Center for Life Sciences at Peking University. Dr. Deng received her B.S. in Biological Science from Peking University in 2006 and her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012, under the mentorship of Prof. Gerd A. Blobel.
She conducted postdoctoral research at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute with Prof. Robert Singer and subsequently at the University of California, Berkeley with Prof. Robert Tjian (2013–2019), supported by the Helen Hay Whitney Fellowship (2014–2017).
She has received numerous honors including the UPenn President Gutmann Leadership Award, the CHOP Distinguished Research Trainee Award, and the ASH Merit Award.
Her research group applies advanced light microscopy and single-molecule imaging to visualize dynamic transcriptional and chromatin organization events in living cells, with the goal of uncovering gene expression mechanisms underlying stem cell pluripotency, differentiation, and disease.
Among her landmark contributions, she was the first to precisely manipulate the spatial organization of chromatin at an endogenous locus to directly control gene transcription; she developed CASFISH, a novel CRISPR-based method for fluorescent in situ genomic DNA labeling; she revealed unique single-molecule target search mechanisms of pioneer transcription factors; and she developed single-molecule localization and diffusivity microscopy (SMLDM), capable of generating high-density single-molecule diffusivity maps in living cells. SMLDM enables simultaneous mapping of molecular mobility and spatial localization at the single-molecule level, providing a powerful new tool for dissecting the functional states of transcription factors and chromatin-associated proteins within the native nuclear environment.
Her findings have been published in Cell, Science, PNAS, Blood, NSMB, and Nature Methods.
Markus Sauer
Markus Sauer is a full professor for Biophysics at the Biocenter of the University of Würzburg and head and spokesperson of the Rudolf-Virchow Center for Integrative and Translational Bioimaging. The work of his group focuses on the development of new refined fluorescence imaging methods with a particular focus on single-molecule sensitive super-resolution microscopy methods.
The ultimate goal of their work is to understand the functional three-dimensional organization of cells and their building blocks with molecular resolution.
His independent laboratory’s work started in 1998 at the University of Heidelberg after he received the BioFuture Award of the German Government to establish a group for single-molecule handling, detection, and characterization. In these early days of single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy they demonstrated the unequivocal identification of up to four different fluorophores at the single-molecule level by time-resolved fluorescence detection. He moved to the University of Bielefeld in 2003 as full professor for Laser Physics and Laser Spectroscopy where he developed the basis for reliable photoswitching of fluorophores in thiol-buffers, which laid the foundation for the development of single-molecule localization microscopy by direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (dSTORM).
Since he moved to the University of Würzburg in 2009, he further optimized and applied various super-resolution microscopy methods to investigate the molecular architecture of synapses, centrioles, mitochondria, nuclear pore complexes and synaptonemal complexes. He leads a multidisciplinary team with background in biology, chemistry, physics, computer science and neuroscience. His team generates experimental data and deciphers the resulting data using statistical and machine learning tools. He collaborates with several labs around the world to bring new technologies and analysis tools to bear upon the study of complex tissues, in health and disease.
In close cooperation with the University Hospital Würzburg, they developed methods to characterize tumor cells and T cells with single-molecule sensitivity to improve the efficacy and safety of immunotherapies. In addition, they develop tools to decode the interplay of therapeutic antibodies with tumor cells to induce killing by the complement system and immune cells. Nowadays, they focus their research on improving the spatial resolution of super-resolution microscopy methods to enable true molecular resolution fluorescence imaging in cells. This work includes the investigation of fluorophore interactions in the sub-10 nm range as well as methods to bypass these limitations by using TDI-DNA-PAINT and Photoswitching Fingerprint Analysis.
Finally, they are currently developing methods that combine Expansion Microscopy and super-resolution microscopy to achieve a structural resolution of 1-5 nm in cells and tissue.
Baohui Chen
Dr. Baohui Chen is a principal investigator at Zhejiang University. She received her undergraduate degree from Wuhan University and earned her Ph.D. through a joint program at Peking Union Medical College and the National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing.
Following her postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), she joined Zhejiang University as a principle investigator in 2017.
Her research focuses on developing technologies for live-cell tracking and manipulation of nucleic acids, and leveraging these methodologies to explore the dynamic changes and functional regulation of nuclear substructures.
Her key achievements include: establishing CRISPR-Cas systems for live-cell chromatin imaging; developing gene visualization tools such as TriTag, LiveArt, and MONITTR to explore RNA Polymerase I/II regulation; and creating gene manipulation methods including Narta and Ribo-On/Off.
Don’t miss this opportunity to meet these experts during SFBS 2026! Join us in Bordeaux from October 19 to 21, 2026!
Interested in sharing your work as well? Submit your abstract before June 1, 2026 for a chance to give a talk or present a poster.
