The Future of Data Science in Cell Biology

“The Future of Data Science in Cell Biology” is the fourth and final session in ASCB’s “Connect and Discover: Data Science in Cell Imaging Virtual Meeting Series.” During this session, speakers will highlight future opportunities of emerging data science applications in cell biology. The session will include a series of short talks, followed by a moderated panel discussion featuring all speakers.

Speakers:  

• • Alan Lowe, The Alan Turing Institute, and University College London
  • Maddy Parsons, King’s College London
  • Susanne Rafelski, The Allen Institute
  • Loic Royer, Chan Zuckerberg Biohub
  • Hari Shroff, HHMI Janelia Research Campus

Organizers:

• Assaf Zaritsky, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
• Meghan Driscoll, University of Minnesota

Alan Lowe is an Associate Professor at University College London, and a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for AI and data science. His research group comprises a team of computer scientists, physicists and biologists that develop state-of-the-art quantitative imaging, computer vision and machine learning approaches to learn the fundamental principles of living systems. These computational approaches combine time-lapse imaging, multi-object tracking and explainable and physics-inspired AI to learn models of biological processes. Before starting a research group, Dr. Lowe was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and previously attended the University of Cambridge, UK where he was awarded a Ph.D. in Biophysics.

Maddy Parson is a Professor of Cell Biology, King’s College London, Dean for Research Excellence, and Director: Microscopy Innovation Centre and Nikon Imaging Centre. She attended University College London where she was awarded a PhD in Biochemistry, Dept. of Medicine, and received her Postdoc at Cancer Research UK London Research Institute. Her research focuses on understanding how receptor signalling contributes to cytoskeletal dynamics, cell adhesion and migration in the context of different diseases. A key focus is on the development and implementation of novel advanced microscopy approaches to study cells within 3D environments. We have well-established collaborations with clinicians to study receptor signalling events in skin blistering, fibrosis, cancer, wound healing and inflammation as well as multi-disciplinary projects with physicists, engineers, data/computational scientists and chemists to develop new approaches to study spatio-temporal signalling events in living cells. Our efforts in these areas have provided significant advances in our understanding of novel genes and signalling events contribute to diseases, as well as promoting multidisciplinary collaborations and realising the impact of technology developments in biological applications.

Susanne Rafelski is the Deputy Director of the Allen Institute for Cell Science, which aims to understand the principles by which human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) establish and maintain robust dynamic localization of cellular structures, and how cells transition between states during differentiation and disease. Prior to joining the Institute, Susanne was an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Developmental and Cell Biology, the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and the Center for Complex Biological Systems at UC Irvine where her lab studied the principles of intracellular organization, via the control of size, topology, and function of mitochondrial networks in budding yeast and mammalian cells. Susanne started at the Institute in 2016 as the Director of Assay Development where she contributed to developing and implementing the overall scientific direction of the Institute, which she now continues to guide.

Hari Shroff received a B.S.E. in bioengineering from the University of Washington in 2001, and under the supervision of Dr. Jan Liphardt, completed his Ph.D. in biophysics at the University of California at Berkeley in 2006. He spent the next three years performing postdoctoral research in Eric Betzig’s lab at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus where his research focused on the development of photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM), an optical super-resolution technique that earned Betzig a share of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For the next thirteen years, Shroff headed the Laboratory of High Resolution Optical Imaging at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health, working to improve fluorescence microscopy methods suited for volumetric time-lapse (‘4D’) imaging. Commercialized inventions from this period include dual-view selective plane illumination microscopy (diSPIM) and instant super-resolution microscopy (iSIM). Shroff recently returned to Janelia, where he continues to push the envelope in biological imaging. Current areas of research include adaptive optics, deep learning, and the study of brain development in simple organisms.

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