In memoriam: Prof. Dr. Jochen Guck (1973 to 2025)

The BioBrillouin Society mourns the loss of Prof. Dr. Jochen Guck, who died on 3 October 2025 at the age of 52 after a serious illness. Jochen was Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and at the Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin in Erlangen, as well as Chair of Biological Optomechanics at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU).

Born in Schweinfurt in 1973, he studied physics in Würzburg and received his doctorate in physics from the University of Texas at Austin. He went on to lead a junior research group in Leipzig, then joined the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge as Lecturer and later Reader in Biophysics, before becoming Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Cellular Machines at BIOTEC, TU Dresden.

Jochen was a pioneer of cell mechanics and mechanobiology. From the optical stretcher to real-time deformability cytometry, he showed that the mechanical properties of cells and tissues are rich sources of biological and medical insight. His work helped define how our community thinks about light, mechanics and living matter and earned numerous distinctions, including the Cozzarelli Award of the US National Academy of Sciences, the Wilhelm Ostwald Medal and the Greve Prize of the Leopoldina.

Jochen was deeply connected to our community. At this year’s BioBrillouin Society annual meeting at Harnack House in Berlin, we dedicated the opening session to his memory and inaugurated a prize that bears his name. Many of us will remember his sharp questions, his enthusiasm for bringing light, mechanics and biology together, and his unfailing support for young scientists.

Jochen is survived by his wife, Doris Lorenz-Guck, and their daughter, Moira. We extend our heartfelt condolences to his family, friends and colleagues. His ideas and example will continue to shape BioBrillouin science for many years to come.

News from the society

Hello everyone, we're Lucie and Pierre, and here is the BioBrillouin society's newsletter for the month of December 2025.

9th BioBrillouin Conference in Berlin

Thank you all for joining the BioBrillouin 2025 conference in Berlin!

We (for the first time!) had an attendance of more than 100 people, with sponsorship from 8 companies, showing that the field is rapidly growing. Presentations included many diverse applications from measuring phase transitions in living cells, sperm cell mechanics, to migration patterns of Blue Whales. Also, from the instrument development and data analysis perspective there was much news, from full-field scanning Fabry Perot Brillouin imaging, to Brillouin spectroscopy on a Photonics Integrated Circuit (PIC), to low photo-damage Heterodyne Brillouin spectroscopy, and standardized software frameworks for data analysis, to name just a few. Several presentations also addressed the interpretation of Brillouin scattering and theoretical aspects in hydrated biological samples, including simulations of mechanics across spatio-temporal scales and the physical curiosities of water. There were also numerous interesting presentations of direct medical relevance (spanning ALS to Long-COVID). We want to sincerely thank you and all the sponsors for helping make the meeting as amazing and diverse as it was, and hope everyone walked away with some new knowledge, a lot of new ideas and some things to think about!

We here again congratulate Konstantin Michel and Humberto Romero Limón on winning the first Jochen Gück Award, and Mathlide Lettinga on being awarded the Best Poster prize.

• Mathilde Lettinga

• Konstantin Michel

• Humberto Romero Limon

We also want to thank our keynote speakers: Anna Taubenberger, Birgit Stiller, Nicoletta Petridou, Giuliano Scarcelli, Luc Thévenaz, and Kirill Larin, for their remarkable contributions.

And we thank the wonderful talks of our invited speakers: Shinji Kajimoto, George Fytas, Alessio Zaccone, Biman Bagchi, Brendan Kennedy, Stephanie Möllmert, Ingolf Sack, Alberto Bilenca, Giuseppe Antonacci and Miguel González Herráez.

We reserve a special thanks to the organizing team for their dedicated work throughout the event, and we are deeply grateful to our sponsors for their generous support.

As annonuced during the conference, the organizing team would like to prepare a special issue in the Journal of Microscopy (deadline : 1 June 2026). You are all invited to contribute to this issue, to know more, please click here.

Next BioBrillouin conference in Exeter

The next BioBrillouin conference will take place at Exeter University in Exeter (United Kingdom) between October and December 2026. The definitve date for the conference will be announced shortly

We look forward to seeing you there!

Next Newsletter

The next newsletter will be sent out on March 1, 2025. We therefore ask you to send us your information before February 20, 2025. Thanks in advance

Administrative updates

The legal aspects of society are now being finalized and the logistical aspects (website etc.) are in the process of being implemented. Registration for society will commence within next months and we will inform you of this/actions needed. Note: if you registered for Berlin BioBrillouin meeting you automatically have 1 year membership. More info on this will follow soon!

New publications

Articles

• Kothmayer et al - Aging Reduces Intestinal Stem Cell Activity in Killifish and Intermittent Fasting Reverses Intestinal Gene Expression Patterns - link

Prepublication

• Alonso Baez et al - The mechanical properties of Arabidopsis thaliana roots adapt dynamically during development and to stress - link

• Jin et al - A Framework for Spontaneous Brillouin Noise: Unveiling Fundamental Limits in Brillouin Metrology - link

• Machida et al - Lipids Are Involved in Heterochromatin Condensation: A Quantitative Raman and Brillouin Microscopy Study - link

• Shi et al - Coaxial line-scanning Brillouin microscopy - link

• Teav et al - Performance loss and recovery of virtually-imaged phased arrays with imperfect mirror parallelism - link

• Vovard et al - Probing molecular concentration in cell nuclei with Brillouin microscopy - link

• Bevilacqua et al - A standardized file format and open-source analysis framework for Brillouin microscopy data - link

• Czibula et al - The potential of Brillouin Spectroscopy for investigating the mechanical properties of hydrogels during dehydration - link

• Garcia-Baucells et al - Centrosome Softening Ensures Mitotic Fidelity Under Microtubule Forces - link

• Leong et al - Critical phenomenon underlies de novo luminogenesis during mammalian follicle development - link

• Pochylski et al - Full-Field Brillouin Microscopy with a Scanning Fabry-Perot Interferometer - link

• Zerin et al - The Cell Wall Controls Stem Cell Fate in the Arabidopsis Shoot Apical Meristem - link

Upcoming events

• Conference - 17 - 22 January 2026 - San Francisco (United States of America) - SPIE Photonics West - link

• Conference - 9-13 February 2026 - EMBL Heidelberg (Germany) - EMBL Course on Brillouin microscopy for life science applications - link

• Workshop - 9 -11 February 2026 - Sydney (Australia) - 6th international Workshop on Optomechanics and Brillouin-Mandelstam scattering: Fundamentals, Applications and Technology (WOMBAT) - link

• Conference - 24 - 26 March 2026 - Munich (Germany) - Analytica - link

• Conference - 14 -16 April 2026 - Exeter (United Kingdoms) - Spring SciX 2026 - link

• Conference - 2026 - Exeter (United Kingdoms) - BioBrillouin 2026

New position openings

• Post-doctoral position on applying Brillouin-Raman microscopy applied to cancer detection (3 years contract) - University of Exeter - Exeter (United Kingdom) - Francesca Palombo

• PhD position on time-resolved BLS - Institut Lumiere Matiere - Lyon (France) - Thomas Dehoux

Interesting facts

• How is the success of Brillouin Light Scattering spectroscopy connected to the success of Elvis Presley?

  One of the key enabling commercial technologies that brought Brillouin light scattering to “common” scientific usage (starting in the ~1970-1980's) was the 6-pass Tandem Fabry Perot spectrometer, developed by John Sandercock. John Sandercock at the time worked for Radio Corporation of America (RCA) - a company founded in 1919 by General Electric with the initial aim of acquiring assets of Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company. RCA are probably most famous for introducing both the black-and-white and colour television to homes around the world. As with other large electronics companies at the time (Bell Labs, Xerox, etc.), investing in basic/applied research was “cool” and well-funded. RCA went through a number of liquidations of its divisions, and changes in ownership. Two assets associated with the brand-name RCA that still remain are NBC and RCA Records. RCA Records famously signed a young Elvis Presley in 1955 from a small Nashville label (Sun Records) for a nominal fee, and released his records to the masses, making him the worlds' first “Rock Star”. Changes in focus of the RCA company led John Sandercock to start his own company (Table Stable Ltd) which commercialized the first Brillouin Spectrometer... and that is at least one way in which Brilloiun Light Spectroscopy is directly connected to Elvis Presley!

Bis repetita perennis

You can send us all pre-publications and publications you have submitted, as well as any relevant publications/prepublications you have read at newsletter@biobrillouin.org so we can share them with the community in the next newsletter. Thank you!