Optical microscopy is an important tool for research in the life sciences and prevalent in virtually every biological laboratory. Many scientific questions especially in cellular and molecular biology, however, are challenging to answer with simple conventional microscopes but require advanced systems and expert planning of experiments. This is particularly true for conducting studies in living cells in 3D. In this course, world-leading developers of advanced next-generation live-cell microscopy instrumentation, in particular structured illumination microscopy (SIM for live cell super-resolution imaging), quantitative phase microscopy (QPM for label-free imaging of cells and cell systems), and selective plane illumination microscopy (SPIM for imaging small to large scale cell systems), talked about the fundamentals spanning physics and computational sciences, bio-imaging application areas, and technical implementation details of their respective techniques. While the course was open for everyone to attend, students participated in it for credits. The participants were required to present their own work revolving around development or application of microscopy techniques for life sciences. Mode of presentation was a poster (poster prize winner was Lucas Kreiß, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg) in conjunction with a short oral "flash" presentation. The presentations were awarded with 2 ETCS.