Ilaria Testa

Ilaria Testa is a Professor in Applied Physics at the SciLifeLab, the Unit of Biophysics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Her research group works at the interface of physics, chemistry and neuroscience to investigate the complex principles underlying protein-protein interaction and dynamics in cells and tissues. They are fascinated by the transient nature of fundamental biological process such as synaptic transmission which is enabled by molecules moving rapidly and timely within the intricate synaptic environment.

These studies are enabled by new technologies, she and her team build microscopes capable of recording images of a diverse set of proteins at the nanoscale and dynamically.

Light patterning, sample-adaptive acquisition and imaging scheme based on photo-switching probes pushed the biological imaging from mere screenshots to movies. Recently, they demonstrate event-triggered microscopy to capture elusive cellular events at high resolution and STARSS, an approach to measure rotational dynamics of cellular complexes to detect molecular assemblies.

Find out more at Ilaria Testa scholar and testalab.org and TEDx-KTH talk