Xiaowei Zhuang, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and David B. Arnold Jr. Professor of Science in the departments of physics and chemistry & chemical biology at Harvard University, received the 2015 Award for Research Excellence in Nanotechnology from the Nano/Bio Interface Center (NBIC) at Penn.

Dr. Zhuang is a biophysicist recognized for her work in the development and application of advanced optical imaging techniques for the studies of biological systems. She invented Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM), one of the first single-molecule-based super-resolution imaging methods, and established STORM as a powerful tool for biology. She invented a single-cell transcriptome imaging method, MERFISH (multiplexed, error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization), which allows in situ transcriptomic analysis in the native context of cells and tissues.

As the award recipient, Dr. Zhuang gave a talk last week entitled “Illuminating Biology at the Nanoscale with Single-molecule and Super-resolution Fluorescence Microscopy.”