“I push the limits of sensitivity and resolution, to make the invisible visible.”

Peter Zijlstra is an associate professor of Molecular Plasmonics in the research group for Molecular Biosensing for Medical Diagnostics, a joint group of the TU/e departments of Applied Physics and Biomedical Engineering. He develops approaches for single-molecule sensing with the aim to study individual biomolecules in complex environments. In particular, his research focuses on single-molecule detection using plasmonic and fluorescent approaches. His research group combines concepts from single-molecule microscopy, plasmonics, super-resolution miicroscopy and modelling to develop novel sensing concepts and study biomolecular interactions. 

Visit the group website (www.molecular-plasmonics.nl) and the Marie Curie ITN SuperCol (www.supercol.eu) for more information.

Peter Zijlstra studied Applied Physics at the University of Twente (Enschede, The Netherlands), where he obtained his MSc degree in 2005. In 2009, he received his PhD from Swinburne University of Technology (Melbourne, Australia), where he studied the photothermal properties of single plasmonic nanoparticles with applications in optical data storage. After a postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Prof. Michel Orrit at Leiden University (The Netherlands) he moved to Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e, The Netherlands). He is currently an associate professor in the research group Molecular Biosensing at the department of Applied Physics. He is a core member of the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems at TU/e, wherein groups from different disciplines (chemistry, physics, biomedical engineering, mathematics) collaborate on multidisciplinary research topics.