Prof.dr.ir. Bram Koster
Prof. Dr. Ir. Abraham Johannes (Bram) Koster (born in 1960) has been working in the Section of Electron Microscopy at the Department of Cell and Chemical Biology at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) since 2006.
His research activities are described in: Koster Lab / Electron microscopy research
He obtained his PhD in Physics in 1989 from Delft University of Technology, focusing on the mathematical modeling and automation of transmission electron microscopes.
Between 1989 and 1991, he worked as a Project Manager and Software Developer at Tietz Video and Imaging Processing (TVIPS, GmbH) in Gauting, near Munich, Germany.
From 1991 to 1993, he was a post-doctoral fellow in David Agard's group at UCSF, San Francisco, working on the automation of electron tomography.
From 1993 to 1997, he worked in Wolfgang Baumeister's group at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, near Munich, Germany, where he developed and pioneered low-dose cryo tomography methods.
In 1997, he returned to the Netherlands to join Arie Verkleij's group at Utrecht University, where he became an Associate Professor and established his research group focused on method development for 3D imaging of electron microscopy specimens. From 1998 to 2003, he was a Fellow of the Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW).
In 2006, he joined the Leiden University Medical Center and was appointed full professor in 2008. In 2015, he also became Professor of Nanobioimaging at the Faculty of Science at Leiden University.
Between 2009 and 2022, he was head of the Section of Electron Microscopy, which is part of the Department of Cell and Chemical Biology.
Between 2015 and 2018, he served as the Scientific Director of the Netherlands Center of Electron Nanoscopy (NeCEN), also located in Leiden.
Since 2022, he has focused his research on the development and application of cryo-electron tomography methods to image molecular structures within cells at very high resolution using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
In 2023, he spent a three-month sabbatical at UCSF with Shawn Zheng to expand his knowledge and experience in developing and applying software tools for investigating cell structures using cryo-electron tomography.
Bram Koster enjoys developing and automating advanced electron microscopy methods. He has worked with a variety of imaging techniques and collaborated with numerous research groups on diverse topics in both biological and materials sciences.
He is passionate about working on the fundamental scientific aspects of technology to establish innovative applications across different scientific fields. He also enjoys working at the interface between academia and industry and has been part of numerous international research consortia and projects.
For more than 30 years, Bram Koster has been involved with electron microscopy in various ways. His own scientific contributions are mainly in the realm of automating the different steps required to generate 2D and 3D datasets of biological structures. The method he developed during his PhD for the automated focusing of a transmission electron microscope is used in many implementations of software for the control of transmission electron microscopes.
The research he has conducted in collaboration with other groups is diverse and ranges from high-throughput data collection and imaging of virus-induced replication organelles in cells to imaging structures in kidney organoids and molecular components involved with the immune system.
For more information on his research interests and professional profile, please check out the Leiden University Medical Center Electron Microscopy Research webpage, his publications on PubMed, his ORCID reference and his LinkedIn profile.
