High Content Imaging 2021

Steve Bagley

University of Manchester

Steve is head of the Visualisation, Irradiation & Analysis facility at Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, which applies super resolution, in vitro and in vivo irradiation, high content screening, digital pathology and image analysis for over 35 research groups and over 520 projects.

High Content Screening has been a major initiative in the lab since 2005 when we discovered that microsopy was overlooking rare populations of cells and HCS presented a method to use algorithms for selection whilst permiting bioimaging to be more collabortaive.

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Alex Sossick

University of Cambridge

Alex heads the Imaging Facility at the Gurdon Institute, which includes a variety of microscopy techniques including confocal, high throughput and deconvolution. He is keen to raise the level of microscopy understanding and application, and runs and takes part in various microscopy courses.

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Samantha Peel

AstraZeneca

AstraZeneca
Sam is an Associate Principal Scientist currently working within the Functional Genomics team at AstraZeneca in Cambridge, UK.  My current role is centred around the use of genetic (including CRISPR reagents) and other perturbants to interrogate complex biology and identify new targets for the treatment of different diseases.  I have a particular interest in the application of confocal fluorescent microscopy to develop high content, phenotypic cell & tissue based imaging assays for target identification and validation.  Before joining AstraZeneca in 2010, I held a postdoctoral research position at the University of Nottingham where my work focussed on cell signalling in airway smooth muscle. I have a PhD in cell signalling from the University of Nottingham and a BSc in Pharmacology from the University of Bath.

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David Brook

University of Nottingham

No bio provided

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Thierry Dorval

Servier

Thierry Dorval received a B.S. degree in theoretical physic and obtained a Ph.D. in image processing and artificial intelligence at Pierre & Marie Curie University, Paris, France. He then joined the Institut Pasteur Korea in 2005 first as researcher in biological image analysis then as a group leader specialized in High Content Screening applied to cellular differentiation as well as toxicity prediction. In 2012 he joined AstraZeneca, UK, where he was leading the Image and Data Analytics team. His activities were about developing and advising on quantitative image and data analysis solutions in support of high content phenotypic screens.

In 2015 he joined Servier, France, first as leader of the High Content Screening group within CentEX CPCB and then as Head of Data Science Lab, working on phenotypic approaches to improve drug discovery pipeline efficiency using high content and machine learning strategies.

 

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Liz Rosethorne

Sygnature Discovery

Elizabeth Rosethorne is a cellular and molecular pharmacologist with extensive experience in GPCR pharmacology and Respiratory Drug Discovery within industry and academia. Her expertise predominantly lies in developing and utilizing a wide range of in vitro experimental techniques for use in screening novel compounds and mechanism of action studies. These include the use of phenotypic assays to identify novel targets for disease, the exploration of biased signalling and the role of signalling kinetics in determining agonist efficacy.

Liz gained a PhD in GPCR Pharmacology at the University of Leicester, after which she was an Investigator at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research. Here she managed a small team focused on primary human cell biology and High Content Imaging, with a focus on chronic respiratory diseases. She then moved to the University of Nottingham as a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Life Sciences, where she continued to focus on cAMP signalling and its role in inhibiting the chronic phenotypic behaviours associated with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). Liz currently works for Sygnature Discovery, where she continues to work and consult on a range of pre-clinical drug discovery programmes.

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Jonny Sexton

University of Michigan

No bio provided

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Adam Corrigan

AstraZeneca

Adam Corrigan joined AstraZeneca five years ago in the Image Analytics team in Discovery Sciences. This is a field which has revolutionised AI and machine learning. In this team, they are developing and applying these methods to extract new insights from imaging data, and integrating with other data sources to transform workflows in early drug discovery.

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Heba Sailem

King's College London, UK

Dr Sailem research is focused on understanding the interplay between genetic and phenotypic components underlying changes in tissue architecture. To achieve that she develops statistical and machine learning methodologies for analysing large biomedical datasets with a focus on cellular imaging and single cell data. In 2017, She has been awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Research Fellowship to develop a knowledge-driven machine learning framework for characterising gene functions in different cell types. These methods revealed a potential role for olfactory receptors in epithelial colorectal cell organisation.

She did her PhD at the Institute of Cancer Research in London under the supervision of Prof Chris Bakal. While at the ICR she developed methods for integrating phenotypic data with gene expression, modelling of the relationship between cell signalling and its context, and modelling the dynamics of cell morphogenesis. In these studies, she discovered new links between cell shape and breast cancer progression.

She is also interested in data visualisation as an important tool for science communication. She devised PhenoPlot, one of the first tools that are specifically designed for visualising phenotypic data. This method facilitates the interpretation of high dimensional data by generating pictorial representations of cells based on hundreds to thousands of measurements.

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Rafael Carazo Salas

University of Bristol, UK

Rafael Carazo Salas is Professor and Chair of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Bristol (https://carazosalaslab.org). Trained in Montreal, CERN, Cambridge and Paris in physics, mathematics and cell biology, he did a PhD at EMBL Heidelberg and postdoctoral work with Sir Paul Nurse in London and the Rockefeller University in New York before holding independent PI positions in ETH Zurich and University of Cambridge. With >25 years of interdisciplinary research experience in quantitative cell and systems biology Rafael has provided key contributions to the mitosis, cytoskeleton, cell polarity and cell morphogenesis fields, and is a prominent figure in the field of systems microscopy and phenomics, helping among others to co-establish the Image Data Resource (IDR; http://idr.openmicroscopy.org/). Rafael’s group uses human Pluripotent Stem Cells (hPSCs), CRISPR gene editing, high-throughput/high-content microscopy and machine learning/AI. Their aim is to learn the rules of cell fate choice and use them to predict optimal human tissue design.

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Judi Wardwell-Swanson

InSphero

Judi Wardwell-Swanson is a Senior Scientist at InSphero and President of the Society of Biomolecular Imaging and Informatics (SBI2) board of directors. Her current work is focused on the development of high content imaging and microphysiological system applications for human 3D microtissue models. Judi also has accumulated more than 25 years of experience in the pharma industry and has a long-standing interest in utilizing imaging technologies to help drive drug discovery. Prior to joining InSphero, Judi was a Principal Investigator at Bristol-Myers Squibb, where her team conducted phenotypic screens in physiologically-relevant cell models with a focus on the identification and validation of new drug targets. Judi is also the author of a book chapter and several journal articles on high content imaging-related topics such as HCS data management, analysis of multiparametric imaging data, and 3D imaging/analysis of multicellular spheroids.

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Ilya Lukonin

Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research

Ilya has received his Bachelor and Master in Biochemistry at the Freie Universität Berlin. Driven by his interest for imaging and multivariate data analysis, he joined the lab of Prisca Liberali at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for a PhD project where he investigated the molecular mechanisms that underlie the development of intestinal organoids by means of high content screening. Currently he is responsible for supporting HCS projects and assay automation at the institute and developing novel workflows for automated culture and imaging of complicated 3D model systems.

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Martin Humphry

Phasefocus

Martin is the CEO of Phasefocus, a UK-based instrument manufacturer providing life science researchers with new ways to characterise live cell behaviour.  He has a PhD in Physics from the University of Nottingham, is a named inventor on numerous patents, and has run two different microscopy-related companies.  Martin works with his team at Phasefocus to apply computational imaging innovations and data analysis to answer real-world biological questions. 

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Anne Carpenter

Broad Institute

Dr. Carpenter is an Institute Scientist and Merkin Institute Fellow at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Her research group develops algorithms and data analysis methods for large-scale experiments involving images. The team’s open-source CellProfiler software is used by thousands of biologists worldwide (www.cellprofiler.org). Carpenter is a pioneer in image-based profiling, the extraction of rich, unbiased information from images for a number of important applications in drug discovery and functional genomics.

Carpenter focused on high-throughput image analysis during her postdoctoral fellowship at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and MIT’s CSAIL (Computer Sciences/Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). Her PhD is in cell biology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Carpenter has been named an NSF CAREER awardee, an NIH MIRA awardee, a Massachusetts Academy of Sciences fellow (its youngest at the time), a Genome Technology “Rising Young Investigator”, and one of the top-100 AI Leaders in Drug Discovery & Healthcare by Deep Knowledge Analytics. She is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening, and the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences, and one of 65 living Honorary Fellows of the Royal Microscopical Society.

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