Marten Chaillet
Postdoc
I joined the Electron Nanoscopy lab as a PostDoc in June 2026. My passion in science has been to visualize the molecular organization of living systems in unperturbed cells. This is how I ended up developing software in cryogenic electron tomography. The collected data is extremely rich in information but very difficult to computationally interpret, i.e. a great puzzle!
I started my academic journey at Utrecht University where I wrote my PhD thesis on Macromolecular Localization in cryogenic electron tomograms, and developed a software for robust localization. However, one of the key problems in data processing is the computational alignment of microscope images. I was lucky to get a fellowship from Genetech to work on this problem for a year after my PhD. Together with two other amazing software developers, we managed to produce a novel machine learning algorithm for tilt series alignment MissAlignment. Building on this work, we are going to push the boundaries of tomography even further in an attempt to visualize active proteins of the innate immune system inside cells.
In my free time I enjoy playing bass in my band Default Mode Network and like to play strategy video games. I recently picked up bouldering as a sport and have quickly gotten addicted to it!
