Dr. Miriam Menzel, Assistant Professor

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Biography

Miriam studied physics at RWTH Aachen University (Germany) and Imperial College London (UK), with focus on theoretical solid state physics, biophotonics, and medical imaging. In 2013, she joined the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine at Research Center Jülich (Germany), where she started working on optics simulation of polarization microscopy of brain tissue. She wrote her PhD thesis under the supervision of Prof. Kristel Michielsen (Quantum Information Processing group, Jülich Supercomputing Center), using finite-difference time-domain simulations and high-performance computing to model the propagation of light through brain tissue. After completing her PhD in 2018 with distinction (Helmholtz Doctoral Prize 2019), she changed her focus to the experimental development of new light microscopy techniques for brain research, exploiting the scattering of light to visualize complex brain tissue structures. In particular, she developed Computational Scattered Light Imaging (ComSLI), which exploits the scattering of visible light to visualize nerve fiber crossings. Miriam was Klaus Tschira Boost fellow and completed several research stays at the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (Italy), the University of Pittsburgh (USA), and the Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands). From September 2021 until March 2022, she worked as visiting postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford School of Medicine (USA), comparing light and X-ray scattering in brain tissue. In October 2022, Miriam joined the Department of Imaging Physics at Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands) as Assistant Professor. Her lab exploits the full potential of Computational Scattered Light Imaging to resolve complex fiber structures in biological tissues.