Ilaria Testa

Ilaria Testa
Alma mater	University of Genoa
Occupation	Physicist
Known for	RESOLFT, superresolution microscopy
Scientific career
Institutions	Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Academic advisors	Alberto Diaspro Stefan Hell
Website	www.testalab.org

Ilaria Testa is an Italian-born scientist who is a Professor at the Department of Applied Physics at the School of Engineering Science at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology.^[1] She has made major contributions to advanced microscopy, particularly superresolution microscopy (RESOLFT, STED).

Education

Testa studied physics at University of Genoa in Italy and graduated with a M.Sc. in 2005. In 2009, she earned her Ph.D. in Biotechnology. During her Ph.D., she worked on quantitative methods in single-molecule biophysics and studied transitional states in fluorescent proteins.^[2] After completing her thesis, supervised by Alberto Diaspro, she joined Stefan Hell's research group at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, Germany as a postdoctoral researcher^[3] where she had already spent part of her doctoral studies.

Career and research

At the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, Testa played a central role in establishing the superresolution technique RESOLFT, showing that superresolution microscopy can be realized with lower levels of light in living cells and tissues making it more attractive for its usage in the life sciences.^{[4][5][6][7][8]}

From 2015 to 2024, Testa was appointed as a Fellow at the SciLifeLab in Stockholm and served as both an assistant professor and an associate professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. At the SciLifeLab, she set up the Laboratory for Advanced Optical BioImaging.^[9]

In November 2024, she was appointed professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology.^[10]

Testa and her team continue to develop further and use superresolution techniques such as STED and RESOLFT microscopy to understand the fundamental biological processes for health and diseases.^[11][12][13]

Testa is a well-known microscopist who is an established member of the advanced microscopy community and is frequently invited on panels and as a keynote speaker at key conferences in the field.^[14][15][16]

Awards and honors

• 2015, ERC Starting Grant "MoNaLISA" ^[17]
• 2017, ESP Young Investigator Award^[18]
• 2020, ERC Consolidator Grant "InSpIRe"^[19][20][21]
• 2025, RMS Award for Light Microscopy^[22]

References

1. "Ilaria Testa". Retrieved 2023-07-06.
2. Marx, Vivien (August 1, 2018). "Ilaria Testa". Nature Methods. 15 (8): 557. doi:10.1038/s41592-018-0078-z. PMID 30065372. S2CID 256836501.
3. "Interview: Staying focused". eLife. October 9, 2017.
4. Grotjohann, Tim; Testa, Ilaria; Leutenegger, Marcel; Bock, Hannes; Urban, Nicolai T.; Lavoie-Cardinal, Flavie; Willig, Katrin I.; Eggeling, Christian; Jakobs, Stefan; Hell, Stefan W. (October 8, 2011). "Diffraction-unlimited all-optical imaging and writing with a photochromic GFP". Nature. 478 (7368): 204–208. Bibcode:2011Natur.478..204G. doi:10.1038/nature10497. PMID 21909116. S2CID 2393728 – via www.nature.com.
5. Brakemann, Tanja; Stiel, Andre C.; Weber, Gert; Andresen, Martin; Testa, Ilaria; Grotjohann, Tim; Leutenegger, Marcel; Plessmann, Uwe; Urlaub, Henning; Eggeling, Christian; Wahl, Markus C.; Hell, Stefan W.; Jakobs, Stefan (October 8, 2011). "A reversibly photoswitchable GFP-like protein with fluorescence excitation decoupled from switching". Nature Biotechnology. 29 (10): 942–947. doi:10.1038/nbt.1952. hdl:11858/00-001M-0000-0012-3E58-5. PMID 21909082. S2CID 17238219 – via www.nature.com.
6. Testa, Ilaria; D’Este, Elisa; Urban, Nicolai T.; Balzarotti, Francisco; Hell, Stefan W. (January 14, 2015). "Dual Channel RESOLFT Nanoscopy by Using Fluorescent State Kinetics". Nano Letters. 15 (1): 103–106. Bibcode:2015NanoL..15..103T. doi:10.1021/nl503058k. PMID 25423166 – via CrossRef.
7. https://www.cell.com/neuron/pdf/S0896-6273(12)00719-2.pdf
8. "Pushing the Boundaries of Super-resolution Microscopy". 19 September 2012 – via www.youtube.com.
9. "TestaLab". www.testalab.org.
10. "KTH | Ilaria Testa". www.kth.se.
11. Bodén, Andreas; Pennacchietti, Francesca; Coceano, Giovanna; Damenti, Martina; Ratz, Michael; Testa, Ilaria (May 8, 2021). "Volumetric live cell imaging with three-dimensional parallelized RESOLFT microscopy". Nature Biotechnology. 39 (5): 609–618. doi:10.1038/s41587-020-00779-2. PMID 33432197. S2CID 231585351 – via www.nature.com.
12. Masullo, Luciano A.; Bodén, Andreas; Pennacchietti, Francesca; Coceano, Giovanna; Ratz, Michael; Testa, Ilaria (August 16, 2018). "Enhanced photon collection enables four dimensional fluorescence nanoscopy of living systems". Nature Communications. 9 (1): 3281. Bibcode:2018NatCo...9.3281M. doi:10.1038/s41467-018-05799-w. PMC 6095837. PMID 30115928.
13. Pennacchietti, Francesca; Serebrovskaya, Ekaterina O.; Faro, Aline R.; Shemyakina, Irina I.; Bozhanova, Nina G.; Kotlobay, Alexey A.; Gurskaya, Nadya G.; Bodén, Andreas; Dreier, Jes; Chudakov, Dmitry M.; Lukyanov, Konstantin A.; Verkhusha, Vladislav V.; Mishin, Alexander S.; Testa, Ilaria (August 8, 2018). "Fast reversibly photoswitching red fluorescent proteins for live-cell RESOLFT nanoscopy". Nature Methods. 15 (8): 601–604. doi:10.1038/s41592-018-0052-9. PMID 29988095. S2CID 256840689 – via www.nature.com.
14. "Seeing is Believing: Imaging the Molecular Processes of Life – Course and Conference Office". www.embl.org.
15. "Speakers – Rudolf-Virchow-Zentrum – Center for Integrative and Translational Bioimaging". www.uni-wuerzburg.de.
16. "Speakers – SMLMS 2023".
17. "Long-term molecular nanoscale imaging of neuronal function | MoNaLISA | Project | Fact sheet | H2020 | CORDIS | European Commission".
18. "ESP Young Investigator Award | European Society for Photobiology". www.photobiology.eu.
19. "Two KTH researchers receive ERC Consolidator Grants". KTH.
20. "Three SciLifeLab researchers receive ERC Consolidator Grants". December 17, 2020.
21. "List of Principal Investigators – LS domain" (PDF).
22. "Award for Light Microscopy".

External links

• Can Microscopes Make Decisions? | Ilaria Testa | TEDxKTH
• The Microscopists interviews Ilaria Testa