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Welcome to OICE: Where Light turns into Science!

OICE is a central scientific centre of the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Originally founded in 2012 as the Optical Imaging Centre Erlangen, it was successfully evaluated by an international review board in 2017. Due to the start of a major structural reorganisation of central and interdisciplinary units at the Friedrich-Alexander University in 2020, OICE had to undergo an evaluation by the FAU. This was successfully passed in 2022, and since then OICE has been an integral part of the central technology platforms of the FAU as the newly founded Optical Imaging Competence Centre (FAU OICE).

The Centre’s mission is to provide and co-ordinate access to high-end light microscopes through its Core Facility Unit, to promote research and development of new systems and techniques through its Exploratory Research Unit, and to provide training for researchers at all levels through its Education and Training Unit. OICE’s instruments are open to researchers from FAU, local research institutes (such as Max-Planck, Fraunhofer e.g.) but also to every researcher from abroad, too!

OICE now supports the research of more than 60 research groups and, on average, more than 250 individuals each year. Their backgrounds range from life sciences and medicine to physics and materials science.

OICE enables research at scales from the nanometre to the millimetre, on fixed and unfixed specimens, and at the intra-vital level. This is supported by post-processing and image analysis

Together with the FAU’s Faculties of Natural, Medical and Materials Sciences and the University Hospital OICE is embedded in a broad research landscape that includes the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits Biomedical Imaging, the Cluster of Excellence Engineering of Advanced Materials, the Erlangen Graduate School in Advanced Optical Technologies and the Max Planck Centre for Physics and Medicine.

Our Collaborators: