Katarzyna Kedziora, PhD, postdoctoral researcher in the 大象传媒 Department of Genetics, received a $740,000 Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) grant to support increased collaboration and innovations in imaging technology research.
Today, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) announced nearly $32 million in funding to support biomedical imaging researchers, technology development, and the BioImaging North America international network of bioimaging facilities and communities. CZI also opened a new聽聽aimed at supporting technology development that will allow researchers to see the inner workings of cells, including proteins, at near-atomic resolution to better understand what causes disease and how to develop treatments.
Katarzyna Kedziora, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the 大象传媒 Department of聽Genetics Lab of Jeremy Purvis, PhD, and a principal investigator at the聽Bioinformatics and Analytics Research Collaborative聽at 大象传媒-Chapel Hill, earned a five-year, $740,000-grant for her project titled, 鈥淓mpowering Biologists with Deep Learning Approaches for Image Analysis.鈥�
In her role with the collaborative, Kedziora provides support for image analysis to the 大象传媒 community of biological and biomedical researchers and their network of collaborators. She develops customized and automated data analysis and visualization pipelines and trains scientists to use them in their quantitative microscopy projects. For the CZI project, Kedziora will collaborate with the information technology and research computing teams to provide the imaging community access to tools and resources to improve data and metadata handling, data quality control and reproducibility, and the sharing of imaging datasets. She will focus on identifying and supporting projects that could benefit most from machine and deep learning approaches. She also plans to use her teaching experience to develop a workshop focused on deep learning in microscopy image analysis.
鈥淲e want to enable researchers everywhere to visualize, measure, and analyze the biological processes underlying health and disease,鈥� said CZI Head of Science, Cori Bargmann. 鈥淭hat means taking multiple approaches. We鈥檙e pushing the frontiers with our Deep Tissue Imaging grants, we鈥檙e supporting Imaging Scientists 鈥� the key technology experts who disseminate new advances 鈥� and we鈥檙e building community with BioImaging North America. We鈥檙e thrilled to welcome our new imaging grantees.鈥�
CZI鈥檚 Imaging program aims to drive breakthroughs in curing, preventing, or managing disease by advancing the imaging field. This includes increasing collaboration between biologists and technology experts, improving microscopy tools and expanding access to these tools, and supporting increased training and community building. Learn more about CZI鈥檚聽聽and read more about the聽.
Kedziora is a microscopist and image analyst with extensive experience in developing and applying advanced microscopy techniques, designing new image analysis algorithms, automating analysis pipelines, and teaching microscopy on all levels 鈥� from third graders to postdocs. She became interested in microscopy during her studies in biophysics at the Jagiellonian University and biomedical engineering at the University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland. She completed her PhD at The Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam, where she developed and applied advanced microscopy techniques to study motility and signaling of individual cancer cells.
As an imaging scientist associated with The Bioinformatics and Research Collaborative, she works with microscopy cores to provide support for image analysis to researchers studying diverse questions in cell biology. She is fascinated with how machine and deep learning has changed the field of computer vision and is passionate about making these state-of-the-art analysis methods accessible to biologists working with microscopy images.
Article originally appeared in the 大象传媒 Health News Room. https://news.unchealthcare.org/2020/12/kedziora-receives-chan-zuckerberg-initiative-grant/