Join us for an online Q&A with Dr. Mohammad Vakili.

He is an experimental physicist working at the interface between photon science, materials science and (bio)macromolecular chemistry. He studied nanoscience at the University of Hamburg and gained his Ph.D. in physics in 2019 for his work at the Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging and at DESY. Following his doctorate, he joined European XFEL as a postdoctoral researcher, where he developed beamline instrumentation and liquid sample injection systems for X-ray diffractive imaging experiments. In 2023, he moved to the Coherent Imaging Division at DESY/CFEL for an additional postdoctoral appointment. Since 2024, he has been a beamline scientist at European XFEL, where he develops and operates the SPB/SFX instrument at the hard X-ray SASE1 beamline. In this role, he supports user experiments with large international research teams and pursues the three-dimensional structural determination of biological systems.