This project has been made possible in part by a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, an advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
Session III: Success stories of young Imaging Scientists @ Exchange of Experience VII - 14:45 – 15:45- URUGUAY TIME
Moderator: Leonel Malacrida, Institute Pasteur of Montevideo &Univ. de la República
Dr Itano is a cellular biophysicist, Assistant Professor of Cell Biology and Physiology and Director of the Neuroscience Microscopy Core at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, where she develops and customises state-of-the-art optical imaging and analysis applications for a wide range of scientific research. Dr Itano received her doctorate from the UNC School of Medicine, did her postdoctoral work at The Rockefeller University, and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology at Carolina. As Director of the Neuroscience Microscopy Core at the UNC Neuroscience Center, she trains and consults with investigators to fully address their imaging needs. She has developed and applied advanced microscopy techniques, cell biological applications, and quantitative image analysis to uncover meaningful relationships between proteins, non-coding RNAs, viral RNA genomes, and other building blocks of basic biology. Her expertise helps scientists at UNC-Chapel Hill and the surrounding area make crucial discoveries about human health and disease. In 2019, she was selected to be a CZI Imaging Scientist. She is also very invested in facilitating collaborations between researchers, software and infrastructure engineers and computing specialists to design and disseminate efficient bioimaging pipelines.
Alex Vallmitjana is a physicist from the University of Barcelona with a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. In 2017 he moved to the University of California Irvine for a postdoc at the Laboratory for Fluorescence Dynamics. Being a computational-oriented person leaning towards image processing and data visualization, he also greatly enjoys working with hardware and building instruments. During the PhD he was mainly developing image processing algorithms for calcium imaging but during his postdoc he was able to apply some of the background optics knowledge and, as an amateur astrophotographer, transitioned from telescopes to microscopes. He participated in building and maintaining sate-of-the-art custom-built fluorescence confocal microscopes, specifically oriented to lifetime and spectral imaging. One of the techniques that he and collaborators developed during his time at UCI led to a patent with applications to the hot field of spatialomics. This has been his focus since the summer of 2020 when they founded a University of California spin-off, Arvetas Biosciences.
Johanna Bischof is a scientific project manager at the Euro-BioImaging ERIC Bio-Hub, managing user access, the Node community and the technology portfolio for biological imaging within Euro-BioImaging. Johanna first became interested in science through microscopy. She used a wide range of imaging tools from AFM and EM to super-resolution and lightsheet microscopy during her research on different biological questions. Following a PhD in Cell Biology and Biophysics from EMBL, she completed a postdoc at Tufts University in Boston, studying neural regeneration and teaching students how to use microscopes. In 2020, Johanna joined the Euro-BioImaging team to contribute to the organisation's mission of democratising access to the best imaging tools and expertise.
Caron Jacobs is a South African cell biologist and imaging scientist, at the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine at the University of Cape Town the University of Cape Town, as well as the co-founder of the African BioImaging Consortium (ABIC). Caron completed her BSc and MSc in Biochemistry at the University of Pretoria, and then pursued her PhD at University College London where she used quantitative super-resolution imaging to study viral-cell infection processes. She returned to South Africa for post-doctoral research in 2018, developing imaging and analytical tools for spatially-derived omics and mycobacterial research at the University of Cape Town. Caron was awarded a Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Imaging Scientist fellowship in 2020, to develop projects working to democratize bioimaging for infectious disease research in Africa. The African BioImaging Consortium (ABIC) was launched in March 2021, and through this Caron works with African colleagues to strengthen the African microscopy community and increase access to bioimaging infrastructure and education across the continent.
