Eric Betzig

University of California, Berkeley

Now a professor of physics and of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley — after formative years at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus — Eric Betzig took an unusually winding path through academia and industry before reshaping optical imaging. The American physicist's central contribution was photoactivated localization microscopy, abbreviated PALM, a method that achieves resolution far beyond the diffraction limit by exploiting the controlled, one-at-a-time activation of individual fluorescent molecules. That invention earned him a one-third share of the 2014 chemistry Nobel awarded for super-resolved fluorescence microscopy. Rather than imaging all molecules at once, PALM switches on only a sparse, random subset at a time, pinpoints the position of each single emitter with high precision, and then assembles thousands of these localizations into a complete super-resolution image. Earlier in his career, Betzig worked at Bell Laboratories on near-field scanning optical microscopy, and after a period in private industry he returned to research with the localization ideas that earned the Nobel Prize. At Janelia he went on to invent lattice light-sheet microscopy, which images living cells and developing embryos in three dimensions at high speed with minimal phototoxicity, and adaptive-optics methods that correct for optical aberrations in thick biological tissue. His instruments are widely used across cell biology, developmental biology, and neuroscience.