Collaborating on Customized Imaging Analysis and Community Engagement
Award Imaging Scientist
Funding Cycle Cycle 2
Investigator
Beth Cimini, PhD
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (Imaging Platform)
Bio
Dr. Beth Cimini is the Lead Image Assay Developer for the Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass. After doing research in visual neuroscience with Dr. William Eldred at Boston University as an undergraduate, she obtained a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn at the University of California, San Francisco, studying the difference between splicing variants of the telomere master scaffolding protein TIN2. These projects honed her interests in image analysis, leading her to join Dr. Anne Carpenter’s lab at the Broad, where she leads a team collaborating with approximately 30 outside scientists per year on their own custom image analysis projects. She also co-maintains the lab’s main software tool, CellProfiler, and directs the Broad’s efforts towards community engagement and driving biological projects for the Center for Open Bioimage Analysis.
Project Description
The Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard combines multiple aspects of image analysis under one roof—software engineering; creating popular tools like CellProfiler and CellProfiler-Analyst; researching morphological profiling and other bioinformatic investigations of image data; and developing image assays. Creating these assays involves working with multidisciplinary teams and biologists worldwide to apply existing and new technologies to real biological problems, helping biologists get better data from their images. In 2019 the image assay development team launched the Postdoctoral Training Program in Bioimage Analysis, recruiting microscopists to learn image analysis, software engineering, project management skills, and more to help them grow into careers in quantitative image analysis in academia and industry.