Who are we

We are optical cell biologists. We study biomedical questions by building new tools in optical microscopy and artificial intelligence, and we release them as open technology that extends what cellular imaging can reach. We publish all our methods and data openly so any researcher can check and reuse them. In biology we work on virology, microbiology, host-pathogen interactions, immunology and cell signalling, through new classes of fluorescent probes, fast and gentle super-resolution methods, and computational modelling. We build these tools to answer our own questions, and other fields use them too.

Ricardo Henriques directs the laboratory. Since 2024 we have been based at the Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica António Xavier (ITQB NOVA) of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in Oeiras. Ricardo founded the group in 2013 at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, University College London. Between 2017 and 2020 we also ran a small laboratory at The Francis Crick Institute. From 2020 to 2024 the group worked at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, which is now part of the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine (GIMM).

The group's name has changed with its research themes:

2024-...: AI-driven Optical Biology at ITQB
2020-2024: Optical Cell Biology at IGC
2017-2020: Computational and Optical Biophysics at UCL and The Crick Institute
2013-2017: Quantitative Imaging and Nanobiophysics at UCL

Under every name, we have pushed optics and computational analysis to observe biology that no one could see before.

About the lab logo: Siân Culley designed our logo around 2016, when she was a member of the team. Siân now leads her own laboratory at King's College London; her profile describes its research.