NASA recently unveiled the first images taken by the James Webb Telescope. But the distant cosmos aren't the only ones coming into focus. While astronomers point their instruments up to peer into the stars, microscopists like Dr. Hari Shroff are focusing their gaze down to capture life on Earth. As chief of the Section on High Resolution Optical Imaging at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), Dr. Shroff engineers new microscopes to render the invisibly small in new and improved resolution.
Dr. Peter Bandettini spends a lot of time peering into people's heads. Not because he is clairvoyant, but because he is a biophysicist. Using functional MRI (fMRI), a revolutionary neuroimaging technique he helped pioneer in the '90s, Dr. Bandettini delves into the mysteries of the human brain. He is working to advance fMRI technology to parse out more information about the neural connections that are constantly and spontaneously active even when we think our minds are blank.