Ananthanarayanan was awarded the Royal Microscopical Society Life Sciences Award in 2025 for the use of novel microscopies in cell biology. Her group images individual motor proteins — dynein, kinesin — and the mitochondria they transport, in living cells, at single-molecule sensitivity, combining light-sheet and TIRF-class imaging with particle tracking to ask how organelle positioning and mitochondrial dynamics are controlled. The methodological emphasis is on getting single-molecule sensitivity inside a live cell rather than in vitro, which is the hard version of the problem. 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 — this is the closest thing at UNSW to a biological end-user for an in-cell quantum sensor: the mitochondrial systems she studies are precisely where NV nanodiamond thermometry and free-radical relaxometry at pT/sqrt(Hz) have been aimed, and she has the live-cell imaging infrastructure to validate any such measurement independently.
Leifer develops closed-loop optical instrumentation that simultaneously records brain-wide calcium activity and delivers single-neuron optogenetic perturbations in freely moving C. elegans, building functional atlases of signal propagation and studying how whole-brain neural dynamics generate behavior. His group's whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging in unrestrained animals is a benchmark advanced-microscopy approach for linking neural dynamics to behavior.
Schnitzer's lab invents miniaturized and fiber-based two-photon microscopes and voltage/calcium imaging methods that allow single-cell-resolution recording of neural activity in freely behaving animals, including recent wide-field fluorescence-lifetime voltage imaging developed with the Kasevich group for high-throughput readout of neuronal spiking.
Schultz uses two-photon calcium imaging and other optical neurotechnology to study neural population activity in vivo, with application to understanding circuit dysfunction in neurodegenerative disease and to brain-machine interfaces.
Tank is a pioneer of two-photon laser-scanning microscopy for imaging calcium dynamics in dendrites and neural circuits in vivo, and co-directs the Bezos Center for Neural Circuit Dynamics, which develops large-scale optical recording instrumentation combined with rodent virtual-reality systems to study persistent neural activity and short-term memory. His group's methodological contributions to cellular-resolution optical imaging underpin much of modern systems neuroscience.