Frontiers in Bioimaging 2024

Alberto Elosegui-Artola

Alberto obtained a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Navarra (Spain) in 2012. After graduation, he moved to Barcelona to the laboratory of Pere Roca-Cusachs at IBEC to pursue his postdoctoral studies. During this time, he contributed to the identification of novel molecular mechanisms that explains how cells sense and respond to mechanical properties. 

In 2017, he was funded with a Marie-Skłodowska Curie fellowship to continue his research training in David J. Mooney’s laboratory at Harvard University. Here, he examined the influence of the extracellular matrix viscoelasticity in cell and tissue response. 

In 2020, he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant and started his lab at the Francis Crick Institute in 2021 in a joint appointment with the Physics Department at King's College London. He will integrate physics, engineering and biology to study the role of mechanics in living tissues. 

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Anja Hauser

The research interest of Anja Hauser is focused on the analysis of immune responses in the tissue context.

Anja studied Veterinary Medicine in Hannover. She did her PhD on plasma cell migration and tissue niches supporting the survival of those cells in the bone marrow. This sparked her interest in the interactions between immune cells and their microenvironment.

She went on to work as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University School of Medicine (New Haven, CT, USA), where she used intravital 2-photon microscopy to analyze B cell selection in germinal centers.

Since 2012, she is Professor for Immune Dynamics and Intravital Microscopy at Charité – Universitätsmedizin and Deutsches Rheuma-Forschungszentrum Berlin.

Anja is convinced that technology development is a strong driver for discovery and enjoys working in an interdisciplinary environment, aiming at developing optical microscopy to enable discovery in tissue immunology.

In recent years, she has increasingly focused on translational immunology, partly because she was already using multiplex microscopy long before the devices for this technology were commercially available.

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Marine Laporte

Marine Laporte is a principal investigator at the MeLiS Institute (University of Lyon, France), a recently established department bringing together cell and developmental biologists who study the molecular mechanisms across various cellular compartments—ranging from cilia, membranes, and axons to synapses and neural circuits—with a focus on neuronal and muscular cells. Her primary research interest centers on membrane remodeling mechanisms. Using expansion microscopy combined with genetic manipulation, she investigates how membrane composition and dynamics contribute to ciliary homeostasis and their role in brain-related ciliopathies.

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Arvind Pathak

Johns Hopkins University

Dr. Pathak is Professor of Radiology, Oncology, Biomedical Engineering and Electrical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University (JHU). He is a member of the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Institute for NanoBioTechnology (INBT), the Institute for Computational Medicine (ICM), and the Translational Tissue Engineering Center (TTEC). He directs the Image-based Systems Biology Laboratory (www.pathaklab.org) whose mission is to “transform lives via power of images”. Dr. Pathak received his BS in Electronics Engineering from the University of Poona, India. He then received his PhD from the joint program in Functional Imaging between the Medical College of Wisconsin and Marquette University, where he was a Whitaker Foundation Fellow. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Molecular Imaging in the Dept. of Radiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is a globally recognized expert on functional and molecular imaging, and his high-impact research has been recognized by multiple awards such as the Bill Negendank Award from the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM), and the Career Catalyst Award from the Susan Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, to name a few. Dr. Pathak has served in multiple leadership roles spearheading imaging initiatives, review panels for national and international funding agencies, and journal editorial boards. He has mentored over a 100 award-winning students, staff and junior faculty. He has served on multiple diversity initiatives and is dedicated to mentoring the next generation of thought leaders in imaging. He was the recipient of the ISMRM’s Outstanding Teacher Award and recognized as a 125 Hopkins Hero by the JHU School of Medicine for his “outstanding dedication to the educational and research values of Johns Hopkins University”.

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Virginie Uhlmann

BioVisionCenter at the University of Zurich

Virginie Uhlmann is the Director of the BioVisionCenter at the University of Zurich (Switzerland), a newly-created structure that aims to facilitate the development of open-source tools for the processing of complex bioimage datasets. She is also a Research Group Leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI, Cambridge, UK), where she was Deputy Head of Research until early 2024. Her main research interest is quantitative bioimage analysis, with a focus in approximation theory, machine learning, computational geometry, and statistical shape analysis. Aside from research, she is passionate about building bioimage analysis capacity and connecting together the various scientific communities interested in bioimaging.

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