Celebrating Female Scientists on International Women’s Day 2022

Female scientists are leading ground-breaking research across the world.

We at ZEISS strive to #breakthebias by celebrating the fascinating female researchers we have been fortunate to meet in the last year.

Learn more about our featured female microscopists who are contributing to advancements across many different fields of science:

Dr Kelly Rogers, laboratory head & manager of the the Centre for Dynamic Imaging (CDI) at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Parkville, Victoria (Australia) is helping scientists use advanced imaging technology and powerful computational resources to generate detailed and real-time views of biological systems.

Image copyright: WEHI

Dr. Jiyun Byun, Director of Computer Vision Technologies at Epic Sciences (USA) is leveraging computer vision and machine learning to improve their cancer profiling techniques. She developed multiple imaging algorithms that are a part of their clinical tests.

Dr. Katherine Fantauzzo (right) and Dr. Brenna Dennison (left) from the Department of Craniofacial Biology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (USA) study the mechanisms underlying mammalian craniofacial development. This opens up new therapeutic directions for the treatment of human craniofacial birth defects.

Dr. Regina Joice Cordy is an Assistant Professor of Biology and one of the many faculty who use the Microscopy Training Center at Wake Forest University (USA), an extensive teaching laboratory designed to promote microscopy education.

Dr. Teresa Rodriguez-Calvo (left) and Dr. Paola Apaolaza (right) from the Institute of Diabetes Research (Helmholtz Zentrum München) in Germany focus on increasing our understanding of the immunopathogenesis of human type 1 diabetes in order to develop novel therapies aimed at increasing insulin secretion and stopping the autoimmune attack.

Dr. Pontsho Moela is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Pretoria (South Africa) focusing on identification of therapeutic and diagnostic markers in breast and cervical cancer. She is currently interested in understanding the behavior of persister cells from cervical cancer cells in response to cisplatin and RBBP6 gene silencing.

This year’s first prize of the ZEISS Microscopy Image Contest was awarded to Alicia González Segura (middle), Dolores Molina Fernández (left) and Isabel Sánchez Almazo (right) from the University of Granada (Spain) for their visually stunning image of Emiliania huxleyi coccospheres. 

Professor Shu Yuan Yang of Chang Gung University (Taiwan) studies what makes germ cells distinct from other cells and how they decide their sex using the fruit fly model organism (Drosophila melanogaster).  She uses structured illumination and confocal microscopy. 

Using the ZEISS MultiSEM 506 scanning electron microscope, Dr. Anja Günther and her colleagues from the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg and the Center of Advanced European Studies and Research (caesar) in Bonn, Germany created the first three-dimensional dataset of a bird retina.

Dr. Cecile Charbonneau (left), Dr. Ann Hunter and Katie Hebborn, a team of scientists from Swansea University (UK) has been working together to reveal the identity of the painter of the Queen Anne painting. With the help of ZEISS scanning electron microscopy they have determined the chemical nature of pigments.

At the Cell Cycle and Genomic Stability Laboratory at Fundación Instituto Leloir (Argentina), Dr. Vanesa Gottifredi works under the hypothesis that DNA replication is a valid target for cancer therapy. Using confocal microscopy her group studies the protein checkpoint kinase 1 (Chk1) and its potential role in cancer therapies.

Discover more female microscopists from the last years: