Our latest collaboration with the Chien lab is in Nature Biomedical Engineering!

April 5th 2023: Marco L. wins the fifth poster award for his work on plasmonic enhancement!

Marco Locarno wins his fifth poster award at NWO Physics, in the category "Science Communication". What an intense journey has been!
To rest, Astra will now retire, but don't you worry. You can still read her story on the poster in the corridor next to F060 (Building 22, TU Delft) or online at the (not so) secret page on this website.

March 2023: Marco P. comes back as a PhD student

After his internship with us and after graduating from Erasmus MC, Marco Post joins again as a PhD student. He will continue his work on the protein engineering of Arch and GR. Welcome back!

March 2023: Jordan graduates cum laude

Our lab is proud to announce that Jordan has graduated cum laude! We are confident that she will continue to excel in her future endeavors. Congratulations, Jordan!

December 13th 2022: Marco's poster awarded "Honorable mention" at ImPhys Science day

Congratulations Marco!

November 28 2022: Daan is promoted to Associate Professor

The university in all their inscrutability decided to want to keep us around for a while longer, gave Daan tenure and promoted him to associate professor! Thanks to everyone in the lab whose hard work, perseverance, intelligence and creativity made this possible!

November 1st 2022: Selina Teurlings joins the lab!

Selina will join as an experienced Biotechnician who will among others be in charge of our of cell culturing! Welcome!

October 10th and 11th: find us at NWO Biophysics

Most of our group will participate to NWO Biophysics 2022 in Veldhoven, come say hi!

October 6th: we won the Digital Transformations 2022 Computable award!

Our work with Miao-Ping Chien (Erasmus MC) just won the Digital Transformations 2022 Computable award!

October 3rd: Huma says goodbye to the lab...

...and starts with a new, exciting position in Chemical Engineering as a project manager, still at TU Delft.
Our doors are always open for a tea or a chat, good luck!

October 1st: Laurens Engwegen joins the lab

Laurens joins the lab for his PhD in the context of a BIOlab position that we share with the lab of Wendelin Böhmer. He will work on integrating Machine learning approaches with voltage imaging data analysis. Welcome Laurens!

September 29th: Convergence Health and Technology Flagship "Integrative Neuromedicine" is awarded!

Daan leads a consortium that has been awarded a Convergence flagship! (and is a member of two other flagships out of the ten awarded!) These flagships will strengthen our collaborations in the field of Integrative Neuromedicine, Innovative Imaging and cellular heterogeneteity!

September 21st and 22nd: Marco strikes again!

At NWO CHAINS 2022 Marco won his third poster award! He presented updated results and the jury decided he deserved the prize for the category "The element of surprise". Congratulations!

Sept 1st: Lars van Roemburg, Alejandro Castañeda Garcia and Didier Duquesnoy join the lab

Lars will do his MEP on protein Evolution. We share Alejandro with the lab of Nergis Tömen as our first BIOlab AI PhD student. Alejandro will work on machine learning approaches to analyze GEVI data. Didier will join as labtechnician. Welcome all!

August/September: Matteo and Jordan finish their work with us

We wish them the best for their Master's defenses and good luck for their future!

July 20th: Polina, Thijn and Robin finish their BEPs

Congratulations to our Bachelor students who finished their final projects this month! We wish them the best of luck for their future and hope to see again them in the future!

July 7th: Marco's nanoparticles at BioDay2022

We are happy to announce that Marco won another award for his poster about our plasmonic research at BioDay2022, organized by TU Delft. Also, we got inspired by the many contributions from all the participants who work close to us, figuratively and literally.

June 29th: nomination for the Computable Awards 2022

Our project about determining RNA sequence of cells got nominated for the best digital tranformation at the Computable Awards 2022. From July 4th on, the market will start voting. The public vote determines fifty percent of the winner. On October 5th the winners will be selected.

June 16th and 17th: find us at Dutch Neuroscience Meeting

We will join Dutch Neuroscience Meeting 2022, where Vidya will give a talk about our work on expanding the GEVIs toolbox, and Marco, Xin and Zhenzhen will present their posters. Come to have a chat with us!

May 27th: Bhavika finishes her internship with us

We thank Bhavika for her contribution to modeling proteins with Alphafold and we wish her good luck for her future!

May 25th: Marco wins the poster award at NWO Life 2022!

Marco's colorful and joyful poster about our plasmonic research won the 2nd prize, congratulations!
We celebrated with an home-made ice cream cake that Marco made himself to share the glory with all the lab mates!

May 24th and 25th: find us at NWO Life 2022

A delegation of the Brinks Lab will join NWO Life 2022 congress, where Marco and Zhenzhen will also present two posters. What a great occasion to learn more about our research! Our posters are, respectively, panels 507 and 514.
Drop by to say hi!

April 1st 2022: Xin's paper is in Journal of Optics!

We popped champagne and had some ice cream: Xin's paper on the Octoscope is out!
Thanks to the hard work of Xin, Lex, Teun, Greta, Ruud, Izak and Vidya, we can finally present you the Octoscope: a versatile, multimodal device for all-optical electrophysiology. This is what we work with daily, so make sure you'll read the paper!
Congratulations!

March 17th 2022: the paper by Li, Pin-Rui and Max on linking genotypes and phenotypes of cancer cells is in Nature Biomedical Engineering!

Our collaboration with Miao-Ping Chien's lab is as fruitful as ever: check out the latest paper to discover how real-time optical tagging and image analysis can help study cancer cells!
We are also in the news:

March 2022: Our scientific family gets bigger and spreads around the world too!

We say goodbye to Vidya and Thijs, thank them for their contributions and wish them good luck for their future careers! Vidya will keep collaborating with us from the sunny San Diego, where during her postdoc she will investigate neurodevelopment in organoids; Thijs will carry out his internship before concluding his MSc degree in Nanobiology.

At the same time, we're happy to tell you that the lab is growing too! We welcome all the new students who will contribute to our research:
  • Rui Silva will carry out his PhD in collaboration with Gao's lab in Erasmus MC, in Rotterdam. His project will involve in vivo voltage imaging.
  • Marco Post will do his internship with us, focusing on on directed evolution of proteins under two-photon imaging conditions.
  • Matteo Pirro joins us for a joint MSc thesis under the supervision of Clémentine Boutry, from the Department of Microelectronics (TU Delft). He will work on the mechanical stimulation of neural cells with voltage microscopy imaging, towards soft biodegradable implants.
  • Robin Liu and Thijn Hoekstra join from the Nanobiology programme for their BEPs, respectively on analysis of FLIM data and computational modeling of neural networks.
  • Finally, Polina Kostina returns after her internship to carry out her Nanobiology BEP with us, focusing on machine learning for recognition of neural progenitor cells (NPCs).
Welcome everyone!

February/March 2022: Zehra Kaynak joins for an internship

Zehra Kaynak is joining us for two months to carry out her internship on neural progenitor cells (NPCs) analysis. Good luck!

December 7th 2021: William's paper on linearly polarized GEVI excitation is in Biophysical Journal!

The devil is in the details: detailed control and detailed observation of the the excitation light provides new detailed information about GEVIs!

October 26th 2021: BIOlab sees the light!

Together with our Colleagues Elizabeth Carroll, Kristin Grußmayer, Zoltan Perko, Nergis Tömen and Wendelin Böhmer, we wrote an application to become a Delft Artificial Intelligence lab, which was granted! As of today the Biomedical Intervention Optimization lab (BIOlab) is a fact! We will develop AI methodology for efficient decision making in and interaction with biological and biomedical measurements: examples include optogenetic interventions and optimized radiotherapy!
Update: we have positions available on reinforcement learning and efficient AI in neuroscience, and AI in cancer treatment and superresolution microscopy!

October 13th 2021: the FUNseq paper is on BioRxiv

Exciting work with the Chien lab on functional single cell sequencing, heralding a new way to diagnose and investigate cancer!

October 11th 2021: Cryo-TIRF in Optics Express

Vidya helped the lab of Bernd Rieger obtain cellular data on a new Cryo-TIRF microscope. Congratulations!

August 1st 2021: Convergence open mind grant: e-FUNseq awarded

Together with the lab of Miao-Ping Chien we got a grant to integrate voltage imaging with functional single cell sequencing!

May 5th 2021: NovArch is published in Science Advances!

Our paper on how to increase the SNR of voltage imaging in tissue via  a targeted photoactivation scheme, making dendritic voltage imaging possible, is published in Science Advances! THanks to everyone who contributed!

December 1st 2019: The lab is awarded an NWO-XS grant

We have been awarded a grant in NWO's new XS scheme, where high-risk high-reward ideas are judged by other grant applicants. Thanks, fellow scientists!

September 3rd 2019: We have been awarded an ERC Starting Grant!

Thanks to the hard work of our excellent students, PhDs and Postdocs, the lab has been awarded an ERC starting grant! we are very grateful to the European research council and excited for the opportunity this represents. Here is a TU Delft Press release, and a more in depth description on the applied sciences website.

May 1st 2019: PaQuasar3 in Nature!

Yoav's paper 'Voltage Imaging and Optogenetics reveal behavior-dependent changes in hippocampal dynamics' is online in Nature! Congratulations on a fantastic piece of work, Yoav! Read the paper here. Read the Harvard Press release here.

October 2018: Daan accepts a position as group leader at Erasmus MC!

The Brinks lab is spreading! Daan has accepted a second position as group leader in the Department of Molecular Genetics at Erasmus MC. Our lab now exists in two places at once! Thanks to Roland Kanaar, head of the molecular genetics department, for taking chance on us! We're looking forward to contributing to the molecular genetics research, collaborating with new colleagues on exciting biomedical and clinical projects, welcoming Erasmus MC students to our lab, and most of all combining the strengths of Delft and Erasmus to do awesome science!

September 19 2018: paQuasAr and NovArch in Nature News.

Check out this Nature News feature describing the advent of Voltage Imaging with Genetically Encoded Voltage Indicators and highlighting the recent advances in deep tissue voltage imaging, in particular our work on PaQuasar and Novarch!

July 17 2018:
The Brinks lab is awarded a NWO START UP grant!

We'll use this for nanoscopic investigation of electrical dynamics in neurons.
Thanks to everyone in the lab who has worked so hard on our preliminary data!
link to announcement Thanks NWO!
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