Rate My Professor Bernd Rieger

Bernd Rieger is the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Professor in the Department of Imaging Physics within the Faculty of Applied Sciences at Delft University of Technology. Born in 1973, he earned his M.Sc. degree in physics from the Technische Universität München, Germany, in 1999. He received his Ph.D. degree in image processing and analysis from Delft University of Technology in 2004, with the dissertation titled Structure from Motion in nD Image Analysis. Following his doctorate, he spent one and a half years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, in the group of Dr. Tom Jovin. From 2005 to 2010, he worked for FEI Electron Optics in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, shifting to part-time employment from 2006 upon joining the Department of Imaging Physics at TU Delft as a tenure-track assistant professor. He obtained tenure in 2010, was promoted to associate professor in 2014, and appointed Antoni van Leeuwenhoek full professor in 2017.

His research interests focus on computational microscopy, integrating imaging physics and image processing for light and electron microscopy, particularly in life sciences at the biomolecular level. Rieger has advanced super-resolution techniques, including single-molecule localization microscopy and related image analysis methods. He has received major awards such as the NWO Talent fellowship in 2004 for Quantitative Imaging for Molecular Biology, the ERC Consolidator grant in 2015 for Optical nanoscopy at 1 nm resolution: far-field fluorescence control at cryogenic temperatures, and the NWO VICI grant in 2019 for Ultra-resolution with visible light. Prominent publications include Measuring Image Resolution in Optical Nanoscopy (Nature Methods, 2013), Fast, single-molecule localization that achieves theoretically minimum uncertainty (Nature Methods, 2010), Super-resolution fight club: A broad assessment of 2D & 3D single-molecule localization microscopy software (Nature Methods, 2019), Localization microscopy at doubled precision with patterned illumination (Nature Methods, 2020), and Simultaneous orientation and 3D localization microscopy with a Vortex point spread function (Nature Communications, 2021). These works have significantly influenced advancements in optical nanoscopy and high-resolution imaging.