温弗里德·登克1957—

学术研究

他1990年在瓦·韦伯(Watt W. Webb)的实验室做博士后研究员时率先实现了双光子激发显微镜。登克后来（1994年）认识到双光子显微镜活细胞成像的深高散射问题上具有独特的性能。他的第二个重大发明是一台机器，可以自动获取分辨率为几纳米的三维图像。这种技术被称为串行块面扫描电子显微镜，已被加坦公司商业化。

奖项和荣誉

2003年被授予戈特弗里德·威廉·莱布尼茨奖。

2012年获科维理神经科学奖。

2013年成为美国国家科学院外籍会员。

Winfried Denk (born November 12, 1957, in Munich) is a German physicist. He built the first two-photon microscope while he was a graduate student (and briefly a postdoc) in Watt W. Webb's lab at Cornell University, in 1989.

Early life and education

Denk was born in Munich, Germany. As a child he spent most of his playtime learning to use the tools and building materials in his father's workshop. In school, it became apparent that Denk’s ‘talents were unevenly spread across subjects, math and physics being favored’. Fixing and constructing electronic devices was his main hobby throughout high school.

After high school, Denk completed the mandatory 15-month stint in the German army and spent the next 3 years at LMU Munich. In 1981, he moved to Zurich to study at ETH Zurich. During this time, he also worked in the lab of Dieter Pohl, at the IBM laboratory. There he built one of the first super-resolution microscopes and developed a passion for scanning microscopy. He did his master's thesis in the lab of Kurt Wüthrich, under the direct guidance of Gerhard Wagner. But he felt that NMR spectroscopy was not for him because it did not involve enough opportunities to create new experimental gadgets.

In 1984, Denk joined the lab of Watt W. Webb at Cornell. While Webb himself was extremely interested in methods – both fluorescence-correlation and photo bleaching-recovery spectroscopy had been invented in his lab – he gave students and postdocs a lot of freedom. Denk enjoyed his time at Cornell but was almost fired after he went to Greece for six weeks to study monk seals. Given a second chance, he started a project aimed at measuring the motion of sensory hair-bundles in the inner ear. One of the attractions of this endeavor was that it required a stay in San Francisco, in order to learn from Jim Hudspeth and his group about hair-cells in general and specifically how to prepare them for the planned measurements.

Denk returned to Cornell and invented a method sensitive enough to measure the thermal movement of hair-bundles. He went on to show that hair cells can sense their own Brownian motion.

Central to Denk's early career was his intuition that two-photon (2p) imaging might damage the sample less than one-photon confocal imaging. He predicted this in spite of the fact that peak light intensity for 2p is almost one million times higher than for the confocal microscope. Equally important was his insight that infrared 2p excitation would allow scattered fluorescence to contribute to images even deep in turbid samples, improving the optical access and resolution of 2p imaging over what was possible using confocal imaging.

Nowhere has this proven more valuable than when imaging neurons in living brain tissue.

Notable papers

Denk, Stricker & Webb1990, Science. Two-photon laser scanning fluorescence microscopy

Denk 1994, Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. Two-photon scanning photochemical microscopy: mapping ligand-gated ion channel distribution

Yuste & Denk 1995, Nature. Dendritic spines as basic functional units of neuronal integration

Svoboda, Tank & Denk 1996, Science. Direct measurement of coupling between dendritic spines and shafts.

Euler, Detwiler & Denk 2002, Nature. Directionally selective calcium signals in dendrites of starburst amacrine cells.

Denk & Horstmann 2004, PLoS Biology. Serial Block-Face Scanning Electron Microscopy to Reconstruct Three-Dimensional Tissue Nanostructure

Helmchen & Denk 2005, Nature Methods. Deep tissue two-photon microscopy

Briggman et al. 2011, Nature. Wiring specificity in the direction-selectivity circuit of the retina

Helmstaedter et al. 2013, Nature. Connectomic reconstruction of the inner plexiform layer in the mouse retina

Recognition

• 1998 Young Investigator Award of the Biophysical Society
• 2000 Rank Prize for Opto-Electronics
• 2003 Leibniz Prize of the DFG (German Research Council)
• 2006 W. Alden Spencer Award, Columbia University, New York
• 2012 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
• 2013 Elected International member American National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
• 2013 Rosenstiel Award
• 2015 Brain Prize (Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Foundation)

2015 International Prize for Translational Neuroscience of the Gertrud Reemtsma Foundation

Service

• 2014 Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO)
• 2015 Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
• 2016 Member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities