I am a life scientist fond of image processing who fell in love with computer graphics. I hold a MSc in Bioengineering and a PhD in Electrical Engineering, with a focus on spline and approximation theory for image analysis.
My work focuses on the development of continuous approaches to quantify, describe, and model objects in bioimages. My current research interests are a mix of computational geometry, statistical shape analysis, machine learning, and biology.
I am leading a bioimage quantification research group at the EMBL-EBI in Cambridge, UK. We are interdisciplinary: we do theoretical research on geometrical modelling, we implement algorithms to extract morphology-related information from images, and we use all of this to understand living systems in the context of collaborative projects with experimentalists. We regularly have internship opportunities for researchers with an applied maths or computer science backgound, and we recruit PhD students through the EMBL International PhD Programme. If you would like to help us building bridges between computer vision and biology, drop me an e-mail!
I firmly believe that the best kind of science stems from collaborations. As such, one of the things I like the most is connecting scientific communities. I contributed to the development of the Theory Transversal Theme at EMBL, an organization-wide effort to establish a new research programme promoting theory-guided paths to biological discovery that I now have the immense honor to co-chair.
Being a first-generation and female scientist, I deeply care about doing my part in making academia a more welcoming and inclusive environment. Towards this goal, I engage in public events in which I tell about some science that I find exciting or being a human in the scientific world. I am also a mathematics and science ambassador in elementary schools in my home country, Switzerland.
As much as I enjoy science, I need a good chunk of climbing and birds in my life to be my whole self.
Please note that this is my personal website and is not related to the institution I currently work in. As I enjoy the analog life more than the digital one, be aware that the content of this website might not be up to date.
I am grateful to the Stack Overflow user community for their precious advice and help in designing this webpage.As of 2020, I am not maintaining the list below up to date. Fortunately, Google Scholar does a decent job at keeping track of my publications.
As of 2020, the Great Zoom Era has made me lose track of the talks I am giving and I am not maintaining the below list anymore.
My group develop mostly Python scripts and pipelines. I also sometimes write Java-based plug-ins for the open-source image analysis softwares ImageJ, Fiji and Icy.
I have often been told that I "code like a mathematician", which I doubt is meant as a compliment. I am not a software engineer, so please bear with me and don't hesitate to get in touch if you are struggling to use something I developed.
I think and explain better when I doodle. Below are some illustrations of this tendency.
These are personal scribbles. In the unlikely event you would like to reuse some of them, I would appreciate to be asked first.
Illustrations for The night that lasted 10 days: a short history of our calendar and Darwin versus Kelvin blog posts.
Illustrations of differences between cubic B-spline and cubic Hermite snakes.
Illustrations of the ability of different spline bases to approximate complex shapes by "linking the dots" and serving as a bridge between the analog and the digital worlds.
Illustrations of the real, mathematical and digital worlds.
Illustrations around Ls=w, the magical formula of my Doktorvater, Michael Unser, concieved together with Julien Fageot for the 20th birthday of the Biomedical Imaging Group at EPFL.
Illustration of Stuart's moods. Stuart is a cockatiel living in my flat.
Illustrations of a conference trip to Novossibirsk.