Overview
The Optical Biology Conference 2025 was organised jointly by UCL LMCB and VIB–KU Leuven. The meeting brought together PhD students, postdocs, PIs and industry partners for a programme of keynote talks, student presentations, poster sessions and an industry day.
Key figures
- Dates: 20–23 August 2025
- Attendees: ~50 participants (visiting organising group + local participants)
- Main activities: keynote lectures, student lightning talks, poster sessions, industry talks, and social & cultural programme
Keynote speakers
- Mehran Ahmadlou — A subcortical switchboard for perseverative, exploratory and disengaged states
- Bart de Strooper — Identifying the Five Key Transitions in Alzheimer’s Disease Progression
- Colinda Scheele — Tissue resistance and oncogenic clones
- Emre Yaksi — Searching for evolutionary traces of vertebrate thalamo-cortical systems
Programme
Thursday — 21 August 2025
| Time | Session | Speaker / Title |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00 – 09:30 | Registration & Coffee | Welcome and morning refreshments |
| 09:30 – 10:15 | Keynote | Mehran Ahmadlou A subcortical switchboard for perseverative, exploratory and disengaged states |
| 10:15 – 11:00 | Keynote | Bart de Strooper Identifying the Five Key Transitions in Alzheimer’s Disease Progression |
| 11:00 – 11:30 | Break | Coffee & networking |
| 11:30 – 11:50 | Student talk | Courtney Lancaster Regulating the basal surface in epithelial morphogenesis |
| 11:50 – 12:10 | Student talk | Hayden Johnson Inferring response time from brain-like VAE encoding |
| 12:10 – 12:30 | Student talk | Zimeng Wu Understanding the mechanochemical dynamics of collective cell behaviours |
| 12:30 – 12:50 | Student talk | Matthias Loidolt All-optical interrogation of internal states modulating hunting decisions |
| 12:50 – 14:30 | Lunch | Venue catering & networking |
| 14:30 – 14:50 | Student talk | Tessa Robberechts Dissecting the compartment-specific role of the RNA-binding protein FUS in health and ALS |
| 14:50 – 15:10 | Student talk | Tinya Chang The inputs to layer 5 of the visual cortex |
| 15:10 – 15:30 | Student talk | Mihaela Gerova Multi-modal sensory selection in mice |
| 15:30 – 15:50 | Student talk | Jacqueline van Vierbergen Aβ plaques induce local pre-synaptic toxicity in human iPSC-derived neuron xenografts |
| 16:00 – 16:15 | Break | Refreshments |
| 16:15 – 17:00 | Networking session | Science speed-dating / short rotations |
| 18:30 – 21:00 | Conference Dinner | Hosted dinner and networking |
Friday — 22 August 2025
| Time | Session | Speaker / Title |
|---|---|---|
| 09:00 – 09:30 | Registration & Coffee | Morning refreshments |
| 09:30 – 10:15 | Keynote | Colinda Scheele Oncogenic clones, tissue dynamics, and resistance to transformation |
| 10:15 – 11:00 | Keynote | Emre Yaksi Searching for evolutionary traces of vertebrate thalamo-cortical systems in the zebrafish brain |
| 11:00 – 11:30 | Break | Coffee & networking |
| 11:30 – 11:50 | Student talk | Şakir Kaan Çetindağ Stimulus-specific contributions of cortical and collicular pathways to visual feature detection |
| 11:50 – 12:10 | Student talk | Zhexing Ge Astrocyte transcriptomic and morphological changes in mouse models of DYT1-TOR1A dystonia |
| 12:10 – 12:30 | Student talk | Sumiya Kuroda Regular health check-ups of a two-photon microscope |
| 12:30 – 12:50 | Student talk | Friedrich Kling Decoding behavioural representations across the dendritic tree |
| 12:50 – 14:30 | Lunch | Venue catering & networking |
| 14:30 – 15:30 | Design & Careers talk | Nastya Krouglova Design principles with Figma: The good, the bad and the ugly |
| 15:30 – 17:00 | Poster session | Poster hall — authors present and discuss |
| 20:00 – late | Evening social | Informal networking and social activities |
Poster sessions
Poster sessions took place across the afternoon programme and provided a major forum for student feedback and networking.
Photos — Leuven 2025
Downloads
Full programme and abstracts (PDF): Programme & Abstracts (PDF)