Organisation

Director, Prof Carlos Penedo

School of Physics and Astronomy and School of Biology, Laboratory for Biophysics and Biomolecular Dynamics, CoB-director at st-andrews.ac.uk

Deputy Director, Dr Juan Varela

School of Physics and Astronomy Neurophotonics at the nanoscale

Dr Graham Bruce

Senior Facility Manager, School of Physics and Astronomy, Optical Manipulation Group, gdb2 at st-andrews.ac.uk

Dr Marcus Bischoff

School of Biology, Developmental biology

Dr Samantha Pitt

School of Medicine, Metal ions in medicine,

Prof Malte Gather

School of Physics and Astronomy, Soft matter photonics,

Dr Maarten Zwart

School of Psychology and neuroscience, Neuroscience of movement,

Dr Paolo Annibale

School of Physics and Astronomy, Lab signalling process and receptors

Strategic values

Interdisciplinary cutting-edge research

CoB promotes an stimulating environment that fosters collaborations between tool-builders and tool-users to find  innovative light-based solutions to the most challenging problems in life sciences.  We aim to be an international reference centre on the use and development of light-based technologies with potential transformative impact in life sciences, both at fundamental and applied research level.

Sharing facilities and knowledge

By sharing facilities we provide a cost-effective and flexible use of state-of-the-art equipment to support innovation. By identifying common goals and maximizing resources, we also remove obstacles to research and accelerate discovery. Any scientific advance can only have impact if other researchers can benefit from it. At the CoB we are committed to share our findings, tools, instrumentation and reagents.

Talent recruitment and training

Our workforce comprises scientists from all over the world and we encourage applications from scientists at all career stages. We are committed to gender and equality and the participating schools have been awarded silver (Pyschology and Neuroscience, Physics, Biology) and Bronze status (Medicine) within the Athena SWAN scheme.

Dissemination and outreach

At CoB we aim to connect science and society and we host public lectures regularly around specific research areas and their impact in everyday life. The ‘Light for Life’ public lectures are free and open to the public. Seating is limited so tickets are required for admission. Many of our public lectures and other outreach events are tailored for primary and secondary school students.