Cell biology scientist developing multiplexed super-resolution assays that turn nanoscale imaging into quantitative readouts of drug mechanism: chromatin reorganization in drug-treated cancer cells, podocyte injury in kidney tissue.
Super-resolution microscopy produces striking images. What makes one useful for understanding how a cell or tissue actually works is everything around it: a titrated antibody, an optimized antigen-retrieval protocol, a validated cell-type marker, and a number at the end that holds up next week, on a different sample, in someone else's hands. That is the work I do.
My route into it was not a straight line. I started in yarn engineering in Bangladesh, the first in my family to attend university, and moved through materials and polymer science in Türkiye and Germany before arriving at North Carolina State University. Each step narrowed the question I was asking, from how fibers behave under stress, to how molecules organize inside a nucleus.
At North Carolina State University's Molecular Analytics and Photonics Lab, my doctoral work centers on two problems. The first is decoding chromatin architecture at the nanoscale, which required building the measurement before the biology was reachable. That produced spectroscopic DNA-PAINT, a method that resolves multiple molecular targets in a single acquisition by separating single molecules on emission spectrum rather than through sequential color channels, published in Nano Letters. The second is smFLUSH, where I characterize single-molecule fluorescence spectral heterogeneity across the Janelia Fluor dye library and use mechanistic and statistical analysis, including Monte Carlo frameworks, to understand what drives that heterogeneity and how it constrains multiplexing.
At Boehringer Ingelheim, in the Cardiovascular Renal Metabolic group, I applied the same approach to tissue. I developed and validated dSTORM and multiplexed DNA-PAINT assays on kidney tissue, built an antibody toolbox for podocyte, PTEC and brush border targets, and established an FSD-based workflow that quantifies podocyte foot-process effacement as a disease-relevant readout, benchmarked against established injury endpoints in an in vivo nephropathy model. I wrote the protocols and ELN documentation so other teams could run the assay and reach the same answer, and handed the workflow off for group-wide adoption.
Underneath both sits a chemistry and materials foundation. I work closely with synthetic chemists on probe design and have hands-on experience synthesizing fluorescent probes and self-labeling dyes, conjugating dyes to antibodies and protein tags, and using DNA origami as calibration standards. Before biology I worked on electrospun nanofiber coatings for nitinol stents at RWTH Aachen and structure-property analysis of engineered polymers. It means that when an assay fails, I can usually tell whether the cause is biological, chemical, or a materials artifact, which is often the difference between a week of troubleshooting and an afternoon.
Mammalian cell culture, transfection, cloning, protein overexpression, immunostaining, and IHC, built into fluorescence and antibody based assays that survive scrutiny. Antibody titration, antigen retrieval, marker validation, and multiplexed detection across cultured cells and tissue, developed with controls and reproducibility as the design constraint.
Tracking chemotherapeutic drug–DNA interactions and drug-induced chromatin reorganization in cancer cells using single-molecule localization microscopy (dSTORM, PALM, DNA-PAINT). Nanoscale changes in chromatin architecture are translated into pharmacodynamically relevant cellular readouts, while single-molecule and single-particle analyses quantify molecular organization and dynamics directly.
Advanced imaging platforms taken from setup to routine use: instrument operation, optimization, troubleshooting, and maintenance, then documented and handed to the people who will run it. Delivered three independent projects in a three month internship, authored transferable protocols and SOPs, trained incoming users, and presented results to technical and cross functional audiences.
Every image below is from my own experiments.
Multiplexed SMLM is capped by how many dyes can be told apart spectrally. Spectroscopic DNA-PAINT pairs DNA-PAINT with spectroscopic SMLM to raise photon budgets and narrow spectral centroid distributions, allowing single-molecule discrimination of dyes with heavily overlapping ensemble spectra. Four targets are resolved in one acquisition with accurate spatial reconstruction and high classification accuracy, validated on DNA origami nanorulers and in fixed cells.
Four-colour spectroscopic DNA-PAINT reconstruction · selected for the cover of Nano Letters, 19 August 2026
Hoechst dyes target nuclear DNA well but are poorly suited to super-resolution. Linking a cyanine chromophore to the bisbenzimide motif separates DNA recognition from optical function, giving hybrid probes that keep high-affinity minor-groove binding while gaining the brightness, photostability, and long-wavelength excitation needed for SMLM. Widefield imaging shows only a diffuse nuclear signal; the reconstruction resolves nanostructured chromatin features across the nucleoplasm.
Single-molecule reconstruction of a cell nucleus
Podocyte foot-process effacement is an early driver of glomerular disease but is unresolvable by conventional light microscopy. I develop dSTORM and DNA-PAINT assays that resolve the nephrin-labelled slit diaphragm in tissue and quantify it as filtration slit density (slit-skeleton length per podocyte area, µm⁻¹). Around this I built an in-house workflow from staining through acquisition to analysis, including a web-based FSD analysis tool with matched Python, MATLAB, and Fiji implementations for reproducible, operator-independent quantification.
Web-Based Workflow for Quantifying Filtration Slit Density (FSD) in Kidney Tissue Sections
Dissertation: Development of a multiplexed super-resolution imaging platform for decoding chromatin organisation.
Investigated structure–property relationships of bio-based polymer fibers for medical applications, then rotated through production, quality control and process troubleshooting in capital-intensive manufacturing.
Fourteen competitive awards, fellowships and grants across four countries.
Gordon Research Conference; Single Molecule Approaches to Biology (2024, 2026) · Biophysical Society Annual Meeting (2026) · EMBL Conference (2025) · SERMACS (2024) · Chromatin and Epigenetics · North Carolina State University Graduate Student Research Symposium (2026)
Elected and appointed roles across student government, advisory committees and international organisations on three continents; the coordination and communication side of scientific work.
If you are building cell- or tissue-based assays, developing imaging platforms and reagents, or need someone who can take a microscope result all the way to a number a team will trust; I would like to talk. Happy to share raw data, protocols or a technical deep-dive. US Permanent Resident; no sponsorship required.