Abstract
The group of Biomedical Photonics at the University of Bern pushes the development of non-invasive imaging techniques based on electromagnetic and acoustic waves to extract anatomical features from biological tissues for pre-clinical and clinical purposes. Because of their penetration depth, X-rays are of special interest in medicine. Conventional and advanced full-field X-ray imaging methods are combined with scattering and fluorescence to characterize biological tissues. A prominent example is three-dimensional virtual histology. The final goal is to decipher diseases by the identification of pathological mechanisms.

Biosketch
Marina Eckermann is tenure-track assistant professor and leader of the Biomedical Photonics group. Under the supervision of Tim Salditt she obtained her BSc degree in physics from the Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany 2014 with a thesis entitled “Scanning small-angle X-ray diffractive imaging of cardiomyocytes”. Her Master thesis in physics with specialization in medical physics, combined with a research stay in Edmonton, was granted by the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany and entitled “Development of advanced image processing methods for X-ray phase contrast neuro-CT experiments” and supervised by Paola Coan. Also, her doctoral thesis was supervised by Tim Salditt at the Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany. Her 2022 awarded doctoral thesis is entitled “Advancing the characterization of neuronal cyto architecture by three-dimensional X-ray phase-contrast tomography”. Between 2022 and 2025, Marina Eckermann was working at the ID16A Nanoimaging-Beamline of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, led by Peter Cletens.