Martin Thämer and I organised and hosted a joint Surface Science and Biophysics Focus Session on “Chemical Imaging for the Elucidation of Molecular Structure” at the DPG Spring-Meeting in Regensburg. I was pleased to see an incredibly broad range of imaging techniques being showcased and some very interesting presentations.

Martin Thämer and I attended the annual Bunsen-Tagung meeting in Leipzig, presenting our work on the structure at the air-water interface as well as using SFG microscopy to characterise the heterogeneous structure in thin molecular films.

Recent work on using SFG microscopy to probe lipid packing structures in model membranes, as well as SFG-DFG to probe the water structure in contact with model charged membrane interfaces, was presented at the Biophysical Winter Seminar in Klosters, CH. It was great to meet new people and we had many riveting scientific discussions.

Our work using azimuthal-scanning phase-resolved SFG microscopy to investigate the effect of phosphatidylserine (PS) lipid exposure on the membrane packing structure has been accepted for the upcoming Faraday Discussion on ‘Structural and Functional Asymmetry of Plasma Membranes’. We look forward to presenting our latest work in April and discussing it with our peers.