Etch a Cell - Correct a Cell

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University of Minnesota

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Douglas Mashek

Douglas Mashek is a professor of Molecular Biology and Biophysics with the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Minnesota/ The central research theme of the Mashek laboratory is on the role of lipid droplets in the development of metabolic and aging-related diseases. Our group's inFATuation with lipid droplets stems from the dynamic nature of the organelles and their ability to influence so many cellular functions beyond simply storing energy. We are so thankful for all the citizen scientists out there generating this useful data, which will greatly advance our understanding of lipid droplets and expedite our progress towards effective therapies for the many diseases characterized by lipid droplet dysfunction.|

Thomas Pengo

Thomas Pengo is the Director of Applications and Services at the University of Minnesota Informatics Institute. His background is in image analysis and microscopy, and the favorite part of his job is to talk to researchers to see how he can bring computer vision methods to all branches of science (and humanities!). In his supervisory work he is lucky to work with a highly skilled team of scientists who are looking to do the same with genomics, metagenomics, proteomics, material science and neuroimaging. In this project he'll be helping the machines recognize lipid droplets and distinguish them from other neighboring organelles.

Lucy Fortson

Lucy Fortson is a Professor in the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Minnesota and a co-founder of the Zooniverse platform. At night, she’s a gamma-ray astrophysicist studying active galactic nuclei. Her day job is pushing our understanding of how to best combine human and machine intelligence on the Zooniverse platform - we can’t tackle the challenges of big data in any domain without both. One of her favorite things about working with the Zooniverse is the opportunity to learn about so many different areas of science - she’s excited to be part of this project because she gets to dust off all that high school biology she learned so many years ago so we can all contribute to an improved understanding of how lipids help keep our bodies together!

Kameswara Bharadwaj Mantha

Kameswara is a postdoctoral researcher and machine learning scientist at the University of Minnesota in Twin Cities with the Zooniverse citizen science platform team. He specializes in development of human-computer optimized, novel deep-learning based frameworks. He is also very interested in various biomedical research and develops new machine learning pipelines to help answer them.

Myat Mo

Myat is a data scientist at University of Minnesota's Informatics Institute. She specializes in developing Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Computer Vision applications. She led the development and application of various deep learning frameworks towards segmentation of lipid droplets within Etch a Cell - Fat Checker project(s).

Ramanakumar Sankar

Ramanakumar Sankar is a postodoctoral researcher and machine learning scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in working on human-computer optimization and data science problems using machine learning on the Zooniverse citizen science platform. He co-leads the development and application of various 2D and 3D machine learning methods to solve various biomedical research problems.

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Mayo Clinic

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Jeffrey Salisbury

Jeffrey is the Scientific Director of the Microscopy and Cell Analysis Facility at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. He engages with investigators, one-on-one, to develop imaging strategies to address their research questions. His research program has employed advanced optical, cutting edge 3D microscopy electron microscopy, comparative proteomics, reverse genetics, and molecular and cell biology methods to define the cellular and molecular mechanisms governing centrosome amplification and genomic instability in breast cancer.

Trace Christensen

As a Research and Development Specialist in the Microscopy and Cell Analysis Facility at the Mayo Clinic, Trace consults with researchers to help apply advanced imaging techniques to their work. Lately he has focused on building a 3D electron microscopy service at Mayo to apply to a variety of biological research applications. What excites Trace the most about the Zooniverse is how it 'visualizes' scientific research - "a compelling image can convey such an important message!" Thanks to everybody for helping us create that compelling image...you are contributing significantly to medical research!

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The Francis Crick Institute, UK

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Helen Spiers

Dr Helen Spiers is the Biomedical Research Lead of the Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org). Currently based across the University of Oxford and The Francis Crick Institute, where she is presently seconded, Dr Spiers collaborates with multiple national and international research groups to develop, deploy and novel biomedical citizen science projects. Although diverse in subject matter, these projects are united by the common aim of applying collective intelligence to perform distributed data analysis of large volumes of biomedical data. Additionally, Dr Spiers analyses the meta-data produced by the Zooniverse platform and applies citizen science to advance electron micrograph segmentation approaches. Prior to her current role, she completed a PhD in developmental epigenetics at King’s College London after obtaining a degree in Biochemistry from the University of Oxford.

Lucy Collinson

Lucy is Head of the Electron Microscopy Science Technology Platform (EM STP) at the Francis Crick Institute in London. She has a research background in microbiology and cell biology, and previously ran biological EM facilities at UCL and Cancer Research UK. The EM STP works with research groups at the Francis Crick Institute to address a range of biological questions that involve imaging a diverse range of samples, from molecules to whole organisms.

Martin Jones

Martin is Deputy Head of Microscopy Prototyping at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Originally an experimental physicist, with an interest in evolutionary and adaptive computation, he switched to biological research at Cancer Research UK’s London Research Institute. After initially working in a vascular biology lab, Martin joined the Electron Microscopy Science Technology Platform where he now works on developing new hardware and software solutions to help acquire and efficiently interpret image data.