French is Professor and former Head of the Photonics Group (2001–2013). His group at Imperial (with Dunsby and Neil) develops multidimensional fluorescence imaging technology for life sciences and clinical applications. Research portfolio: (1) FLIM — wide-field time-gated FLIM using gated optical intensifiers and TCSPC for single-cell FRET-based biosensing of protein-protein interactions, cell signalling (kinase activity), and drug-target engagement in multi-well plates; (2) Super-resolved microscopy — STED, easySTORM (lower-cost STORM), and SIM+FLIM for mapping molecular function to biological nanostructure below the diffraction limit; (3) FLIM endoscopy — flexible wide-field FLIM endoscopes for label-free cancer diagnostics (autofluorescence lifetime) and osteoarthritis cartilage; (4) Open-source imaging — automated multiwell plate FLIM reader for high-content drug screening. Satellite lab at Francis Crick Institute.
Hinde is a fluorescence-fluctuation physicist embedded in cell biology: she uses pair-correlation function analysis, number-and-brightness, phasor-FLIM and FRET to read out chromatin compaction, protein-chromatin binding dynamics and nucleocytoplasmic transport in living nuclei, at spatial and temporal scales that conventional imaging averages away. The programme is a technique-pushing one — the emphasis is on extracting nanoscale structural information from photon statistics rather than on brute-force localisation — and it is now being coupled to quantum sensing through her QUBIC investigatorship, where the goal is to combine fluorescence readouts with NV-based magnetic and spin-noise contrast in the same cell. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — her role in QUBIC is to supply the cell-biological questions and the correlative optical readouts that make pT/sqrt(Hz)-class ensemble sensing biologically interpretable. Preferred attribute present: lifetime- and orientation-resolved methods pushing past the usual resolution limits.
Smith runs Melbourne's time-resolved fluorescence facility and specialises in the information channels most people throw away: fluorescence lifetime, anisotropy decay and its orientational content, and single-molecule photophysics, applied to organic semiconductors, energy-transfer systems and biological samples. The group builds its own confocal microspectroscopy instrumentation for time-resolved anisotropy imaging and single-molecule detection. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — lifetime- and orientation-resolved fluorescence is the principal orthogonal contrast mechanism to spin-based sensing, and his instrumentation is the natural correlative partner for NV-ensemble DEER/relaxometry experiments at pT/sqrt(Hz) that need an independent optical readout of the same specimen. Preferred attribute present: orientation- and lifetime-resolved methods.