Dr. Miriam Menzel studied physics at RWTH Aachen University (Germany) and Imperial College London (UK), before joining the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine, Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany), where she worked on optics simulations for brain imaging. After completing her PhD in 2018 with distinction (Helmholtz Doctoral Prize 2019), she changed her focus to the experimental development of new light microscopy techniques for brain research, exploiting the scattering of light to visualize complex brain tissue structures. Dr. Menzel is Klaus Tschira Boost fellow and completed several research stays at the European Laboratory for Non-Linear Spectroscopy (Italy), the University of Pittsburgh (USA), and the Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands). From September 2021 until March 2022, she worked as visiting postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford School of Medicine (USA), comparing light and X-ray scattering in brain tissue. In October 2022, Dr. Menzel joined the Department of Imaging Physics at Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands) as Assistant Professor. Her lab exploits the full potential of Scattered Light Imaging to resolve complex fiber structures in biological tissues.

Dr. rer. nat. Miriam Menzel
Assistant Professor, TU Delft
Research Topics
Contact
+49 2461/61-96359
https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/inm/inm-1/research/fiber-architecture/scattering-based-imaging
Address
Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH
Wilhelm-Johnen-Straße
52428 Jülich
Institute of Neurosciences and Medicine (INM)
Structural and Functional Organisation of the Brain (INM-1)
Building 15.9 / Room 4018
About Me
My lab exploits the scattering of visible light to resolve complex fiber structures in biological tissues. We further develop Scattered Light Imaging – a highly promising and versatile new imaging technique I created with colleagues in Jülich and which allows to resolve individual, crossing nerve fiber pathways with micrometer resolution. Research projects include hardware development, obtaining comprehensive brain structure information, multi-modal brain imaging, as well as clinical applications.
My Expertise:
- Experimental and theoretical optics, scatterometry, and polarimetry
- Design and engineering of optical imaging systems
- Computational imaging
- Multi-modal image analysis
- Simulation of light-matter interactions