The OpenSPM Initiative: A Collaborative Software and Hardware Platform for Scanning Probe Microscopy
Dr. Marcos Penedo is a physicist and biophysicist with a Ph.D. from the Autonomous University of Madrid, where he developed magnetostrictive techniques to enhance AFM cantilever performance in liquid environments. After his Ph.D., he joined EMPA, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, as a postdoctoral researcher, where he worked on AFM/STM advancements, including groundbreaking studies on molecular motors. His research there involved ultra-low temperature and ultra-high vacuum environments, developing methods to observe and control the dynamics of single-molecule motors, shedding light on energy barriers and entropy effects at the nanoscale.
From 2018 to 2020, Dr. Penedo served as an Assistant Professor at WPI Nano Life Science Institute (NanoLSI) in Japan, pioneering nano-endoscopy AFM techniques for live-cell imaging. Currently, he is a Senior Scientist at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he leads the development of an open-source, high-speed AFM/SPM controller aimed at making high-speed AFM more accessible to the scientific community. Dr. Penedo has published widely, holds several patents, and actively contributes to international scientific research.
