Meet the Principal Investigator
Reto Fiolka, Ph.D.
Reto Fiolka joined UT Southwestern in 2013 as an instructor and worked on high-resolution light sheet microscope technologies. He is currently an assistant professor in the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics. He oversees the development of advanced light microscopes with a focus on 3D live cell imaging in physiologically relevant microenvironments. This has led to the creation of novel light-sheet technologies that enable isotropic spatial resolution over large volumes and rapid image acquisition. Further research competence and interest include adaptive optics for high-resolution imaging in complex samples and super-resolution microscopy.
Dr. Fiolka received a master's degree in mechanical engineering at ETH Zurich in 2006. He did his Ph.D. thesis at the institute of Nanotechnology at ETH Zurich in optical microscopy. From 2009 – 2013, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus under the late Dr. Mats Gustafsson, working on 3D structured illumination microscopy; he later worked under Dr. Meng Cui on adaptive optics. Reto Fiolka joined UT Southwestern in 2013 as an instructor and worked on high-resolution light sheet microscope technologies. In 2016, after receiving a CPRIT recruitment award, he became an assistant professor.
Lab Members
Bo-Jui Chang, Ph.D.
Bo-Jui Chang is an Assistant Professor in the Lyda Hill Department of Bioinformatics at UT Southwestern. He is very interested in Bio-imaging and he particularly specializes in light sheet microscopy (LSM) and super-resolution structured illumination microscopy (SIM). Currently, he focuses on (1) collaborating with biologists to study behaviors of cells, tissues, embryos, etc in physiologically relevant environments, and (2) developing advanced light sheet microscopes and structured illumination microscopes.
Bo-Jui was born and raised in Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electro-Optical Engineering from National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan in 2006. He focused on the development and application of optical tweezers during his Ph.D. From 2007 – 2011 he worked on SIM in Dr. Su-Yu Chiang’s group at National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center, Hsinchu, Taiwan. From 2011 – 2016 he worked on LSM and implemented SIM in LSM in Dr. Ernst H.K. Stelzer’s group in Frankfurt, Germany. He was also an Adjunct Investigator from 2013- 2015 in the Cluster of excellent Frankfurt Macromolecular Complexes. From 2016 – 2017 he worked on a lattice light sheet microscope in Dr. Bi-Chang Chen’s group in Taipei, Taiwan. He joined Dr. Reto Fiolka’s group in Sep. 2017. Outside the lab, Bo-Jui likes almost all kinds of sports, especially baseball/softball. He is also a big fan of Star Trek.
Stephan Daetwyler, Ph.D.
Stephan Daetwyler is a postdoctoral researcher at Fiolka Lab. He is particularly interested in understanding dynamic processes in development and disease such as cancer. The Fiolka Lab and UT Southwestern provide the ideal environment to study such processes by applying and developing state-of-the-art microscopy, custom data processing, and analysis.
Stephan was born and raised in Switzerland where he received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Interdisciplinary Sciences at ETH Zurich with a major in Biology and Physics. In 2013, he joined the lab of Dr. Jan Huisken at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), Dresden, Germany, for his Ph.D. thesis. There, he studied the formation of the vasculature on a whole embryo level in zebrafish. For this, he implemented a dedicated multi-sample light-sheet imaging, processing, and analysis workflow. During his Ph.D. wrap-up time, Stephan was also supported by Dr. Alf Honigmann and Dr. Carl Modes. In collaborations, he contributed amongst others to our understanding of cancer cell dissemination, initiation of metastasis, and formation of organoids. From 2007-2017, Stephan was supported by the Swiss Study Foundation.
Bingying Chen, Ph.D.
Bingying Chen is a postdoctoral researcher at Fiolka Lab. She is interested in developing novel optical imaging technologies and applying them to biomedical applications.
Bingying received a B.S. in Optoelectronic Engineering from Beihang University in 2014 and a Ph.D. from Peking University in 2019, Beijing. She has 3 years of research experience in developing femtosecond fiber lasers, which could serve as the light source of two-photon microscopy. During her Ph.D., She focused on three-photon fluorescence microscopic imaging and its application.
Conor McFadden
Conor is a graduate student in the Biomedical Engineering program at UT Southwestern. He received his B.Sc. in Applied Physics from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada in 2011, and later received his M.Sc. in Medical Physics in 2013, where he developed a laser scanning fluorescence confocal microscope to image charged particles tracks in fluorescent nuclear track detectors. From 2013-2020 he worked as a Research Engineer at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX in the Department of Radiation Physics building portable confocal microscopes for live-cell imaging to study DNA damage response of cancer cells in particle therapy beams.
Conor joined Dr. Fiolka's and Dr. Kevin Dean's lab in 2020 under a joint appointment and aims to apply his engineering skills to further the development of light sheet and multiphoton microscopy. In his free time, you may catch him playing guitar or working on his golf game.
Lab Alumni
Shruthi Madhugiri
Summer intern 2023
Shilpita Mitra-Behura
U-Hack Med Gap Year Intern
2020 - 2021
Ezi Kalunta-Crumpton
Green Fellow
2021
Olwyn Doyle
U-Hack Med Gap Year Intern
2020 - 2021
Tonmoy Chakraborty, Ph.D.
Postdoc 2018 - 2020
Currently: Assistant Professor
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of New Mexico
List of Publications
Etai Saponzik, Ph.D.
Postdoc 2017 - 2022
Currently: Research Scientist
Genentech
South San Francisco, California, United States
List of Publications
Meghan Driscoll, Ph.D.
Postdoc 2014 - 2022
Currently: Assistant Professor
Department of Pharmacology
University of Minnesota
List of Publications