Quantitative Super-resolution Microscopy

Sarah Aufmkolk is a Research Associate at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Genetics. In the group of Ting Wu, she is focusing on advancing genomic imaging technologies for unraveling information hidden in the three-dimensional organization of chromatin. Her goal is to visualize the whole human genome in super-resolution, which she works on in collaboration with other laboratories in the context of the NIH-funded Center of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS).  She is also working on the qualitative assessment of genomic SMLM studies and, in the context of the 4D Nucleome project, is working on platforms for open-source sharing of imaging data. 

Sarah received her Diploma in Physics at the University of Wuerzburg in Germany, where she also completed her Ph.D. studies, titled “Super-resolution Microscopy of Synaptic Proteins”, in 2017 in the group of Markus Sauer, whose team pioneered the super-resolution technique of dSTORM.  

In her postdoctoral research time at the Montreal Neurological Institute and the Chemistry Department of McGill in Montreal, she applied single-molecule localization techniques to investigate the peculiarities of structural changes in synaptic plasticity on the nanoscopic level introduced through development or neurodegenerative diseases. This venture led to the exploration of various fluorescence and label-free imaging techniques pushing for potential correlative imaging approaches with super-resolution microscopy. She continues this effort at Harvard Medical School, applying it to the field of genomics.