Ulrike receives Cooper-Siegel career development chair

Ulrike has received the Cooper-Siegel Career Development Professorship. This professorship, which alternates between Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Physics and School of Computer Science, supports an early career faculty member. We were awarded for our research groups' work on imaging tiny cellular structures by Single Molecule Localization Microscopy. This allows us to localize single molecules in living cells, in contrast to traditional biochemistry techniques that required purifying cellular components to study them in detail. Thus, using single-molecule biophysics, we can understand the physics behind the complex biological processes taking place in cells.

The Cooper-Siegel Professorships were established by Carnegie Mellon trustee Eric Cooper and his wife Naomi Weisberg Siegel. The professorships have a three-year term and can be renewed once. Cooper was a faculty member in Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science from 1985 to 1991, leaving to co-found FORE Systems, one of Pittsburgh's most successful technology companies. He was appointed Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science in 1999 and has served the university as a trustee, guest lecturer and adviser to a number of university committees and boards. Siegel has had a life-long connection to the university. Her father, the late Robert Ted Siegel, earned three degrees in physics, including his Ph.D., from Carnegie Tech by the time he was 23. He then worked as a research associate and a physics professor at Carnegie Tech. Siegel's mother, the late Rebecca Weisberg Siegel, earned two bachelor's degrees from Carnegie Tech in music and music education.