After high school, Denk completed the mandatory 15-month stint in the German army and spent the next 3 years at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
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.
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.
[5] He also showed that it can be combined with adaptive optics to improve resolution, and with amplified pulses to push the depth limit to 1mm in brain tissue.
Denk’s 2004 paper[8] describing automated serial blockface microscopy rekindled the dormant science of comprehensive neural circuit mapping (connectomics), pioneered by Sydney Brenner.
[11] His most recent work involves precisely determining the positions, orientations, and identities of proteins and bound ligands in cryo-preserved cells.
Two-photon scanning photochemical microscopy: mapping ligand-gated ion channel distribution[4] Yuste & Denk 1995, Nature.
Serial Block-Face Scanning Electron Microscopy to Reconstruct Three-Dimensional Tissue Nanostructure[8] Helmchen & Denk 2005, Nature Methods.