In the News
Former NCMIR Project Scientist Awarded Society for Histochemistry's Feulgen Prize.
Ben Giepmans seated at one of NCMIR’s light microscopes: an Olympus FluoView1000 inverted microscope equipped with an environment chamber for long time live-cell imaging.
Dr. Ben Giepmans, former NCMIR project scientist, was awarded the Robert Feulgen Prize for his outstanding contributions to the development and application of new advanced fluorescent proteins and biarsenical-tetracysteine probes for light and electron microscopy. The Feulgen Prize is named in honor of Robert Joachim Feulgen (1884-1955), the German chemist who developed a method for staining DNA (Feulgen reaction).
While at NCMIR (in the laboratories of Mark Ellisman and Roger Tsien), Giepmans contributed to the development and implementation of advanced imaging techniques to study proteins at high spatiotemporal resolution. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health through grants to Ellisman and Tsien for NCMIR (NIH/NCRR P41 RR004050) and for development of new genetically targetable labels for light and EM (NIH/NIGMS P20 GM072033). Today, Giepmans performs related research as a group leader at the department of Cell Biology, University Medical Center Groningen, The Netherlands. His current focus is centered on better understanding how cell-cell junctions and cell surface receptors control pancreatic beta cell proliferation, which may aid in finding new therapies for patients with Type 1 diabetes.
Awarded annually by the Society for Histochemistry, the Robert Feulgen Prize acknowledges work of outstanding scientific merit in the field of microscopical histochemistry — the structure-related functional analysis of living matter. Previous prize laureates were recognized for contributing to the solution of biological or medical problems through the development of histochemical, cytochemical, or instrumental techniques.
Dr. Giepmans will be the 42nd Laureate to receive the award since its inception in 1971 at the 50th Symposium of the Society for Histochemistry in October 2008.
About the Society for Histochemistry
Founded in 1952, the Society for Histochemistry is an international association of histochemists and cytochemists from 26 countries. The Society organizes annual scientific symposia to explore new techniques and their application in the life sciences, particularly to human pathology. The Society publishes Histochemistry and Cell Biology, a journal devoted to the fields of molecular histology and cell biology.
