SFBS 2026 -Ready to meet our new guests?
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.
We are also pleased to reveal three new invited speakers in the programme: Ricardo Henriques, Francesca Pennacchietti and Wei Ji! Discover their background and current research work in this article.
If you are also interested in presenting your work at SFBS 2026, the abstract submission deadline has been extended! Apply here before June 15, 2026 for a chance to give a talk or present a poster.
Ricardo Henriques
Ricardo Henriques is Principal Investigator of the AI-driven Optical Biology lab at ITQB NOVA (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal) and Honorary Professor at University College London. He was elected EMBO Member in 2024.
A particle physicist by training, he turned to biology during a PhD distributed across IMM Lisbon, Institut Pasteur Paris, the CSIR in South Africa, and Andor Technology in the UK, followed by postdoctoral work at Pasteur on viral infection and T-cell immunology.
He established his first independent group at UCL in 2013, opened a satellite laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in 2017, was promoted to Full Professor at UCL in 2019, and moved the group to Portugal in 2020, first at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência and then to ITQB NOVA in 2024.
The lab works at the interface of live-cell super-resolution microscopy, AI-driven bioimage analysis, and host-pathogen biology, organised around one recurring question: how do you see more of a living system while disturbing it less? Methods that emerged from that question (QuickPALM, SRRF, eSRRF, NanoPyx, ZeroCostDL4Mic, DL4MicEverywhere) are used in thousands of labs and helped make deep-learning microscopy accessible to biologists with no computational background.
His current programme builds adaptive nanoscopy for long-term imaging of viral and bacterial infections, paired with shared infrastructure that keeps the resulting AI tools open and reusable. He co-founded FocalPlane and AGRAFr.
Francesca Pennacchietti
Francesca Pennacchietti is an Associate Professor in Experimental Biophysics at the Department of Applied Physics, KTH School of Engineering Sciences (Sweden).
Her research focuses on the synergy between photocontrollable fluorescent proteins and super-resolution microscopy.
Her work explores how the unique photophysical properties of these proteins can be harnessed not only to achieve nanoscale resolution but also to advance bioimaging toward spectral multiplexing, minimally invasive imaging, and biosensing.
By bridging the fields of super-resolution microscopy and photoreceptor biology, she aims to enable real-time visualization and control of cellular processes with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution.
Wei Ji
Wei Ji is a tenured professor at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2005 and his Ph.D. in Biophysics from the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2010.
His research focuses on developing advanced instrumentation for super-resolution imaging and correlative imaging.
He has pioneered a series of interferometric single-molecule localization microscopy (SMLM) methods, including ROSE, ROSE-Z, and ROSE-3D. These techniques localize fluorescent molecules using intensity information from multiple excitation patterns of an interference fringe, achieving higher precision than conventional centroid fitting under the same photon budget. He has also developed cryogenic correlated light, ion, and electron microscopy (cryo-CLIEM), a method that enables the preparation of cryo-lamellae guided by three-dimensional confocal imaging.
Dr. Ji has published numerous papers in high-impact journals such as Nature Methods, and his work has been recognized as one of the Top Ten Advances in Life Sciences in China. He is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, the CAS Young Scientist Award, the Xplorer Prize, and the China Youth Science and Technology Award.
Don’t miss this opportunity to meet these experts during SFBS 2026! Join us in Bordeaux from October 19 to 21, 2026!
Would you like to share your work at SFBS 2026? Good news: the abstract submission deadline has been extended! Apply before June 15, 2026 for a chance to give a talk or present a poster.
