Curmi is a structural and single-molecule biophysicist whose most-cited work is on the light-harvesting antenna proteins of cryptophyte algae, where he and collaborators reported long-lived electronic coherence at ambient temperature — one of the founding results of the quantum-biology field and still one of its most argued-over. His group determines the structures of these antenna complexes and engineers them, and separately works on protein-based molecular motors and on single-molecule fluorescence and FRET measurements of conformational dynamics. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — Curmi supplies the biological systems in which quantum coherence is actually claimed to matter; a pT/sqrt(Hz)-class spin sensor capable of watching radical-pair or exciton dynamics in situ would be aimed at exactly the questions his structures raise. Preferred attribute present: genuine quantum-biology substrate rather than a quantum-flavoured metaphor.

Arjen Jakobi (Associate Professor, BioNanoscience) uses cryo-electron microscopy and tomography for structural cell biology. Research: (1) cryo-ET in-cell structural biology — resolving protein complexes at near-atomic resolution inside vitrified cells; (2) autophagy and membrane remodelling — structural mechanism of autophagosome biogenesis; (3) integrin signalling complexes. Develops algorithms for sub-tomogram averaging and de-novo model building.