Paul Wiseman, Professor of Physics and Chemistry at McGill, has been named the 2024 Fellow of the Biophysical Society of Canada for his major contributions to the development of new quantitative microscopy tools to reveal hidden properties of biomolecules.
“The Biophysical Society of Canada is thrilled to announce Dr. Paul Wiseman as the 2024 BSC Fellow,” the association said in a statement. “His groundbreaking work in fluorescence microscopy and image correlation techniques has transformed cell biology and biophysics.”
The Biophysical Society of Canada (BSC) is a pan-Canadian association that connects biophysics researchers from across the country. Fellow is the highest honour bestowed by the BSC, and Fellows are Canadian scientists who have made exceptional contributions to the field of biophysics.
“It’s a great honour to receive this recognition from my distinguished colleagues working in biophysics research across Canada,” Wiseman said. “I’m grateful to the many collaborators, students, and postdoctoral researchers with whom I’ve had the privilege of working over the years.”
Wiseman and his group work on the development of image-analysis methods for fluorescence microscopy, harnessing theoretical concepts in physics that trace back to Boltzmann, Einstein, and Smoluchowski to provide new insights into the properties of biomolecules.
“Although fluorescence microscopy is widely used by biologists and biomedical researchers, there is additional molecular information that can be accessed by analyzing fluctuations in the signals,” Wiseman said. “I sometimes call it mining the molecular noise: my group has developed a set of methods called image correlation spectroscopy that measure the signal fluctuations in microscopy images, and then correlate the fluctuations to provide high-resolution maps of molecular transport and of interactions between proteins in cells.”
Wiseman’s methods have been taken up by other researchers for use in applications in cellular biophysics, cell biology, and neuroscience.
For more information, visit the Biophysical Society of Canada website.
Congratulations Paul!