Biography:

Maria Garcia-Parajo is an ICREA Research Professor at ICFO-Institute of Photonic Sciences, leading the Single Molecule Biophotonics group. Her research interests lie at the interface between Physics, Photonics and Biology. She obtained her PhD in Physical Electronics in 1993 at Imperial Colleague, UK.  Previous experience includes research at L2M-CNRS Paris (FR) and University of Twente (NL). To date she has published more than 200 publications. She coordinates several international research projects, and is member of various international scientific advisory, executive and editorial boards. She has received several prestigious awards, including National Prize in Biophysics (2017), AdvERC grant (2017) and Emmy Noether Laurate from the European Physical Society (2020). She is co-coordinator of the Winter School in Advanced Microscopy Techniques for the Master in Interdisciplinary Sciences at BIST and is actively involved in (inter)national actions to promote gender equity in Science.

Lecture: "NanoPhotonics meet Biology"

For many years, it was believed that the laws of diffraction set a fundamental limit to the spatial resolution of conventional light microscopy. Major technical developments in the last two decades have demonstrated that the diffraction barrier can be overcome both in the near- and far-field regime. Together with dynamic measurements, these techniques are truly revolutionizing the way we understand Biology. In this didactic lecture I will explain the basic principles of super-resolution microscopy, including near- and far-field concepts. In the near-field regime I will describe the principle of near-field optical microscopy (NSOM), with particular emphasis on the implementation of plasmonic antennas to reach nanometer spatial resolution together with ultrafast dynamics of individual molecules. In the far-field I will concentrate on two major family of techniques: stimulated emission depletion and single molecule localization methods (STORM & PALM), both based on the use of fluorescence probes. I will discuss different technical implementations, examining pro´s and con´s of all of these techniques. Finally, I will show several biological examples to illustrate the unique capabilities offered by these techniques, but also their current limitations.

Seminar: "Plasmonics for Biology"

The quest for optical imaging of biological processes at the nanoscale has driven in recent years a swift development of a large number of nanoscopy techniques based on far-field optics. In parallel, within the nanophotonics community, photonic antennas have emerged as excellent alternative candidates to break the diffraction limit of light by enhancing electromagnetic fields into regions of space much smaller than the wavelength of light. In this seminar I will describe our efforts towards the fabrication of different nanoantenna probe configurations as well as in-plane 2D antenna arrays exhibiting three-orders of magnitude fluorescence enhancement. I will show applications in nano-imaging and spectroscopy of living cells with unprecedented resolution and sensitivity. Finally, I will discuss our efforts towards the implementation of broadband antenna configurations in the visible regime as well as novel approaches to address thousands of antennas in parallel, enabling high-throughput dynamic studies at the nanometre scale and single molecule level.