The ECBO Program Chairs, Brian Pogue, Dartmouth College, USA, and Christoph Hitzenberger, Medical University of Vienna, Austria, will preside over a dynamic plenary session with a theme of  "Bridging the Ocean of Biomedical Optics." The keynote speakers at this event, renowned in their respective fields, can attest to this theme both literally and figuratively, having both recently relocated from one side of the Atlantic Ocean to the other. 

These newly announced speakers,  Vasilis Ntziachristos, Technical University of Munich and the Institute of Biological and Medical Imaging (IBMI) at the Helmholtz Center Munich, Germany, and Jerome Mertz, Boston University, USA, will each present a plenary address. 

Dr. Jerome Mertz, an associate professor of Biomedical Engineering and the principal investigator of the Biomicroscopy Laboratory at Boston University, has research interests in  the development of new microscopy techniques for biological imaging. His plenary talk, "New techniques for out-of-focus background rejection", will discuss recent strategies that have been developed reject out of focus background in both conventional and nonlinear fluorescence microscopies. These strategies are also applied to endomicroscopic imaging.

Prof. Dr. Vasilis Ntziachristos holds the Chair for Biological Imaging at the Technical University of Munich with joined appointments at the School of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology and the School of Medicine and he is the director of the Institute of Biological and Medical Imaging (IBMI) at the Helmholtz Center Munich, the German Research Center for Environmental Health. Ntziachristos will present a talk titled "The emerging era of high-performance mesoscopic and macroscopic photonic imaging", which will cover recent advances in highly performing mesoscopic and macroscopic imaging that open novel investigational routes in biological research, drug discovery and in clinical applications.

The ECBO Call for Papers is now available on-line and paper submissions are being accepted.