Skip to main content
Advertisement

Main menu

  • Home
  • Articles
    • Accepted manuscripts
    • Issue in progress
    • Latest complete issue
    • Issue archive
    • Archive by article type
    • Interviews
    • Sign up for alerts
  • About us
    • About BiO
    • Editors and Board
    • Editor biographies
    • Grants and funding
    • Journal Meetings
    • Workshops
    • The Company of Biologists
    • Journal news
  • For authors
    • Submit a manuscript
    • Aims and scope
    • Presubmission enquiries
    • Article types
    • Manuscript preparation
    • Cover suggestions
    • Editorial process
    • Promoting your paper
    • Open Access
  • Journal info
    • Journal policies
    • Rights and permissions
    • Media policies
    • Reviewer guide
    • Sign up for alerts
  • Contact
    • Contact BiO
    • Advertising
    • Feedback
  • COB
    • About The Company of Biologists
    • Development
    • Journal of Cell Science
    • Journal of Experimental Biology
    • Disease Models & Mechanisms
    • Biology Open

User menu

  • Log in

Search

  • Advanced search
Biology Open
  • COB
    • About The Company of Biologists
    • Development
    • Journal of Cell Science
    • Journal of Experimental Biology
    • Disease Models & Mechanisms
    • Biology Open

supporting biologistsinspiring biology

Biology Open

Advanced search

RSS   Twitter   Facebook   YouTube

  • Home
  • Articles
    • Accepted manuscripts
    • Issue in progress
    • Latest complete issue
    • Issue archive
    • Archive by article type
    • Interviews
    • Sign up for alerts
  • About us
    • About BiO
    • Editors and Board
    • Editor biographies
    • Grants and funding
    • Journal Meetings
    • Workshops
    • The Company of Biologists
    • Journal news
  • For authors
    • Submit a manuscript
    • Aims and scope
    • Presubmission enquiries
    • Article types
    • Manuscript preparation
    • Cover suggestions
    • Editorial process
    • Promoting your paper
    • Open Access
  • Journal info
    • Journal policies
    • Rights and permissions
    • Media policies
    • Reviewer guide
    • Sign up for alerts
  • Contact
    • Contact BiO
    • Advertising
    • Feedback
First Person
First person – Stephan Daetwyler
Biology Open 2020 9: bio057851 doi: 10.1242/bio.057851 Published 2 December 2020
  • Article
  • Figures & tables
  • Info & metrics
  • eLetters
  • PDF
Loading

ABSTRACT

First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Open, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Stephan Daetwyler is first author on ‘Fiji plugin for annotating movies with custom arrows’, published in BiO. Stephan is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Reto Fiolka at UT Southwestern, Dallas, USA, investigating using light sheet and multiphoton microscopy with customized data processing and analysis to understand dynamic processes in vivo.

Embedded Image

Stephan Daetwyler

What is your scientific background and the general focus of your lab?

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Dr Reto Fiolka at UT Southwestern and supported by an Early Mobility Fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). For my research, I am particularly interested in visualizing and understanding dynamic processes in development and disease such as cancer. The Fiolka lab and UT Southwestern provide an ideal environment to study such processes by developing and applying state-of-the art light sheet and multiphoton microscopy tools, custom data processing and analysis.

Before coming to Dallas, I received my BSc and MSc in Interdisciplinary Sciences at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, with a major in biology and physics, and joined the lab of Dr Jan Huisken at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG), Germany, for my doctoral thesis. There, I implemented a dedicated multi-sample light sheet imaging, processing and analysis workflow to study vascular development, which has been published in Development (doi:10.1242/dev.173757). In collaborative work, I further applied this workflow to increase our understanding of cancer cell dissemination, initiation of metastasis, importance of blood flow on vascular remodeling and lineage tracing.

How would you explain the main findings of your paper to non-scientific family and friends?

Adding custom graphical symbols such as arrows, circles or arrowheads to a movie has now become much easier. Previously, researchers often tediously added graphical symbols to every single frames of a time-lapse movie. Now, our paper describes an easy-to-use and intuitive tool to add them.

What are the potential implications of these results for your field of research?

Annotation of movies is important for understanding them. We hope that our tool will be helpful for biologists without any coding experience to simply add custom graphical symbols such as arrows to their movies to highlight certain processes. We applied our tool already in a movie that was awarded an honorable mention in this year's 2020 Nikon small world contest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB6TJ5RmKMY).

“We applied our tool already in a movie that was awarded an honorable mention in this year's 2020 Nikon small world contest.”

What has surprised you the most while conducting your research?

Making a tool for general use is much harder than you think – it requires careful debugging and thinking of potential pitfalls. Therefore, I really admire the people behind large software projects, such as Fiji, who dedicate their time in providing stable and robust open source solutions to the scientific community.

What has this influenced your research path?

When I decided on my doctoral thesis project, I was amazed about the movies acquired on light sheet systems by my thesis mentor Dr Jan Huisken, a pioneer in light sheet microscopy. After seeing those movies, I knew that I wanted to learn how to acquire such movies, how to analyze them and how to improve the imaging techniques behind them even further.

Later, I met my current supervisor Dr Reto Fiolka at the ‘Seeing is Believing’ conference in Heidelberg. I was deeply impressed by his insights into optics ranging from high-resolution microscopy with SIM to deep tissue imaging with multiphoton microscopy, resulting in many important publications and preprints for imaging dynamic processes. These include advances such as Field Synthesis, fast remote refocusing, oblique microscopy or projection imaging.

Figure1
  • Download figure
  • Open in new tab
  • Download powerpoint

The Fiji annotation tool in action.

What changes do you think could improve the professional lives of early-career scientists?

Personally, I feel that publications and impact factor of the journals matter too much for evaluating a candidate for promotion to the next career level. While this is for sure an important aspect, other qualities such as leadership experience, experience in working with people, or outreach activities are also very important skills for a scientist managing a team of researchers as a professor. These qualities are, however, often only secondary when hiring the next assistant professor. If more engaged postdocs, experienced with leadership roles, were promoted, science overall would benefit and be more collaborative. I hypothesize that this would ultimately lead to faster progress and more discoveries.

What's next for you?

I am currently working on two major exciting projects to improve imaging of dynamic processes in disease and development. Hopefully, I will be able to present results of these projects next year. My long-term goal is to lead an independent research program at the interface of microscopy, computation and developmental and cancer biology.

What are your priorities outside of your research program?

I am very engaged in the Postdoctoral Association (PDA) at UT Southwestern as current president. This year has been a challenging year for many of us. Therefore, I have aimed at providing a nice remote work environment by quickly organizing virtual sport classes, a virtual postdoc work-in-progress seminar series, virtual coffee hours during lockdown and a virtual Postdoc Appreciation week with many activities such as a virtual mentor award and a virtual symposium. Luckily, we managed to invite this year's Nobel Prize winner, Dr Jennifer Doudna, as our keynote speaker. Moreover, I have been coordinating the postdoc response to lab occupancy rules by setting up surveys and providing inputs to the university leadership.

The health care crisis has also emphasized the need for improved working conditions of international researchers at the university. Therefore, together with the international student representatives of the graduate students and two other postdocs, I have spearheaded a ten page action plan to support our international community. We have also initiated a change of our PDA bylaws to include dedicated floating officer for Diversity, Inclusion and Equity to improve this aspect of our work.

Currently, I am organizing the first PDA inspiration award to remind us of inspiring people, and activities for the upcoming holiday season when many students might not be able to travel to their families. In addition, I am trying to emphasize the needs of our postdoc community in two 6-year plan committees.

Besides my work for the postdoctoral community, I am also active as Peer Advocate to help students in challenging life situations and in outreach as JRNLclub ambassador, a beautiful website to upload and submit movies of your research paper (https://jrnlclub.org/), and part of the community behind preLights that highlights exciting new preprints.

Footnotes

  • Stephan Daetwyler's contact details: Department of Cell Biology, UT Southwestern, 5901 Forest Park Road, NL5.110, Dallas, TX, 75390, USA.

    E-mail: stephan.daetwyler{at}utsouthwestern.edu

  • © 2020. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.

Reference

  1. ↵
    1. Daetwyler, S.,
    2. Modes, C. D. and
    3. Fiolka, R.
    (2020). Fiji plugin for annotating movies with custom arrows. Biology Open 9, bio056200. doi:10.1242/bio.056200
    OpenUrlAbstract/FREE Full Text
View Abstract
Previous ArticleNext Article
Back to top
Previous ArticleNext Article

This Issue

RSSRSS

 Download PDF

Email

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word on Biology Open.

NOTE: We only request your email address so that the person you are recommending the page to knows that you wanted them to see it, and that it is not junk mail. We do not capture any email address.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
First person – Stephan Daetwyler
(Your Name) has sent you a message from Biology Open
(Your Name) thought you would like to see the Biology Open web site.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Share
First Person
First person – Stephan Daetwyler
Biology Open 2020 9: bio057851 doi: 10.1242/bio.057851 Published 2 December 2020
del.icio.us logo Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo CiteULike logo Facebook logo Google logo Mendeley logo
Citation Tools
First Person
First person – Stephan Daetwyler
Biology Open 2020 9: bio057851 doi: 10.1242/bio.057851 Published 2 December 2020

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
Alerts

Please log in to add an alert for this article.

Sign in to email alerts with your email address

Article Navigation

  • Top
  • Article
    • ABSTRACT
    • Footnotes
    • Reference
  • Figures & tables
  • Info & metrics
  • eLetters
  • PDF

Related articles

Cited by...

More in this TOC section

  • First person – Ivo de Vos
  • First person – Sebastian Markert
  • Future Leader to Watch – Fabrizio Alberti
Show more FIRST PERSON

Similar articles

Other journals from The Company of Biologists

Development

Journal of Cell Science

Journal of Experimental Biology

Disease Models & Mechanisms

Advertisement

Biology Open and COVID-19

We are aware that the COVID-19 pandemic is having an unprecedented impact on researchers worldwide. The Editors of all The Company of Biologists’ journals have been considering ways in which we can alleviate concerns that members of our community may have around publishing activities during this time. Read about the actions we are taking at this time.

Please don’t hesitate to contact the Editorial Office if you have any questions or concerns.


2020 at The Company of Biologists

Despite 2020’s challenges, we achieved a lot at The Company of Biologists. In the midst of the pandemic, we have seen long-term projects and new ventures come to fruition. Read our full lowdown of 2020.


Interview- Sebastian Markert

Sebastian Markert is first author of a paper in BiO using C. elegans to model amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In an interview, he talks about the potential implications of his work and his future plans.


Three communities to support biologists to everywhere

Online communities have never been more important. If you’re looking for somewhere to meet fellow scientists, take part in topical discussions and find virtual events in your field, take a look at each of our community sites:

  • The Node: the community site for and by developmental biologists
  • preLights: the preprint highlights service run by the biological community
  • FocalPlane: the community site for microscopists and biologists alike

Articles

  • Accepted manuscripts
  • Issue in progress
  • Latest complete issue
  • Issue archive
  • Archive by article type
  • Interviews
  • Sign up for alerts

About us

  • About BiO
  • Editors and Board
  • Editor biographies
  • Grants and funding
  • Journal Meetings
  • Workshops
  • The Company of Biologists

For Authors

  • Submit a manuscript
  • Aims and scope
  • Presubmission enquiries
  • Article types
  • Manuscript preparation
  • Cover suggestions
  • Editorial process
  • Promoting your paper
  • Open Access

Journal Info

  • Journal policies
  • Rights and permissions
  • Media policies
  • Reviewer guide
  • Sign up for alerts

Contact

  • Contact BiO
  • Advertising
  • Feedback

Twitter   YouTube   LinkedIn

© 2021   The Company of Biologists Ltd   Registered Charity 277992