Bridging the Gap Between Quantitative Bioimaging and Bench Scientists
Award Imaging Scientist
Funding Cycle Cycle 1
Investigator
Caterina Strambio-De-Castillia, PhD
University of Massachusetts Medical School (Biomedical Imaging Group)
Bio
Caterina Strambio-De-Castillia is a cell biologist with a primary interest in promoting scientific advances through distributing reproducible, well-documented datasets and analysis procedures. She learned her trade in the laboratory of Gunter Blobel, a pioneer of modern cell biology. After joining the Luban lab, she realized that better understanding of how HIV-1 traverses from the cytoplasm to the nucleus would require development of software tools and metadata standards, aiding cross-lab comparison of raw-image data, analytical results and procedures. Her passion is to develop microscopy and image analysis metadata standards to ensure state-of-the-art bioimaging techniques are available to bench scientists, regardless of their computational expertise.
Project Description
The management and analysis of modern microscopy data pose enormous challenges due to lack of automation, standardization and documentation, often making it impossible for different laboratories to work together and hampering scientific progress. Caterina will address this gap by developing easy-to-use, shareable image-analysis pipelines designed to incorporate the automatic capture of data provenance information, quality control, and metadata standards. These pipelines will “stitch together” existing in-house software and popular open-source packages (e.g. OME, Fiji/ImageJ, CellProfiler, scikit-image), providing a bridge between individual laboratories and state-of-the-art global bio-image informatics development initiatives. Caterina will also organize courses and workshops to train experimental scientists to use this technology for their everyday work.