Brad Schwartz Brad Schwartz

From Brad: New hires invigorate our research teams

This summer, we will welcome two new investigators to Morgridge who bring powerful, innovative technologies to bear on understanding human biology and disease.

Both scientists — Randy Bartels and Juan Caicedo —have enormous potential to partner with UW–Madison and Morgridge biologists who are looking for bold new approaches to image biology, to see what is currently unseeable. Indeed, the combined strengths of the University of Wisconsin and Morgridge allow them to do things here that would be difficult to do elsewhere.

For Bartels, a physicist and engineer from Colorado State University, it means developing microscopy and laser technology for applications such as ultra-deep imaging of tissues and vastly improved resolution of cell populations.

For Caicedo, a computer scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, it means inventing computer vision tools to analyze vast amounts of biological data — in some cases, billions of cellular images — to recognize patterns that could be meaningful to human disease.

Their science is cool and exciting in its own right, but what’s equally exciting is the biological challenges that will be coming to their doors in the months and years ahead. Both Juan and Randy have developed platform technologies that have applications in basic research, in modeling and diagnosing disease, in evaluating therapeutics, and many others.

Juan and Randy will both find homes in the Morgridge Biomedical Engineering and Research Computing themes. Those are also areas of great strength and national leadership across UW–Madison. They will help Morgridge continue being a catalyst to take science further in partnership with the university.

Randy and Juan will be here full-time starting in July, and I am confident you will be hearing a lot more about their unique approaches to imaging, the fascinating questions they tackle, and just as importantly, them as people.

Thanks,

Brad Schwartz, CEO, Morgridge Institute