New scientific appointments strengthen editorial board 

The Journal of Microscopy has welcomed two new Scientific Editors to its editorial board: Professor Dylan Owen from the University of Birmingham, UK, and Dr Venera Weinhardt from Heidelberg University, Germany.

Professor Owen is Interdisciplinary Chair of Immunology and Mathematics at the University of Birmingham. With a background in physics and chemical biology, he completed his PhD in biomedical imaging at Imperial College London in 2008, developing spectral and lifetime fluorescence microscopy to study membrane biophysics. His postdoctoral work at the University of New South Wales in the lab of the late Professor Katharine Gaus focused on single-molecule localisation microscopy (SMLM) and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) in T cell signalling.

He established his own lab at King’s College London in 2013, advancing SMLM analysis methods and imaging applications in immunology. His current research includes AI-driven bioimage analysis and community data sharing, bridging the gap between immunology, mathematics, and advanced microscopy.

Dr Venera Weinhardt leads a research group at Heidelberg University’s Centre for Organismal Studies, specialising in advanced X-ray imaging techniques to study cellular and organismal structure. With over a decade of experience in life science applications of in vivo imaging, novel contrast mechanisms, and high-throughput analysis workflows, she has contributed significantly to both imaging hardware and computational workflows.

She was awarded a fellowship through the Walter Benjamin Program of the German Research Foundation, joining Prof Carolyn Larabell’s lab at UCSF and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she advanced soft X-ray microscopy to study infected and healthy cells. Dr Weinhardt is also leading work in lab-based soft X-ray tomography (SXT), supported by the EU’s CoCID project, and is developing complementary imaging modalities such as axial super-resolution fluorescence microscopy through the MSCA-funded CLEXM network.

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