Steven Chu (Stanford U.): Pushing the Boundaries of Light Microscopy

www.ibiology.org/talks/nanoparticle-technology/

Talk Overview:
In order to understand how cells function at the molecular level in an organism, we need to observe the location and behavior of single molecules inside living tissue. However, we are not able to do this using conventional optical microscopy and fluorescent probes/markers. Steven Chu discusses recent advances in optics and nanoparticle technology, which hold great promise for observing individual proteins in living cells and tissues in real-time.

Speaker Biography:
Steven Chu is Professor of Physics and Molecular & Cellular Physiology and the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. From 2009 to 2013, he served as US Secretary of Department of Energy. At the time of his appointment as Energy Secretary, he was a professor of physics and molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His research focuses on the study of biological systems at the single molecule level. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for his work at Bell Labs on cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light.