Who are we

We like to think of ourselves as optical cell biologists. We focus on addressing biomedical questions by exploiting advancements we develop in optical microscopy. To do so, we create open-technology that pushes the boundaries of cellular imaging. All our research and methods are transparent, reproducible and widely available to researchers. In biology, we tackle broad virology, host-pathogen interactions, immunology and cell signalling questions. We do so by establishing new classes of fluorescent probes, high-speed cell-friendly super-resolution methods and computational modelling approaches that, although designed to answer questions of interest in the lab, have extensive cross-disciplinary applications.

The laboratory is directed by Ricardo Henriques. In 2020, we moved the laboratory to Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência from the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology in University College London, where the group was founded in 2013. Between 2017 and 2020 we've had an additional small laboratory at The Francis Crick Institute.

Over the years, our group's name has evolved to reflect our changing research themes. We were originally named Quantitative Imaging and Nanobiophysics, emphasizing our interest in super-resolution microscopy and its application to study nanoscale biological processes. In 2019, as Ricardo became a Chair Professor at UCL, the laboratory briefly renamed to Computational and Optical Biophysics, showcasing our interest in broadening to multi-scale biological research, particularly the application of Deep-Learning into broad biological imaging problems. As we moved to IGC in 2020, we renamed again to Optical Cell Biology, a simplification of our interest in applying optical microscopy techniques to broad cell biology questions. The constant in our lab has always been our interest in pushing the boundaries of optics and computational analysis to make biological observations impossible before.

About the lab logo: our beautiful logo was kindly designed by Siân Culley, circa 2016, while member of our team. Siân now runs her own lab, you can read more about their research here.