Who are we
We like to think of ourselves as optical cell biologists. We focus on addressing biomedical questions by pioneering enabling technology in optical microscopy and artificial intelligence. 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, microbiology, host-pathogen interactions, immunology, and cell signaling questions. We do so by establishing new classes of fluorescent probes, high-speed cell-friendly super-resolution methods, and computational modeling 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 2024, we started moving the laboratory to Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica António Xavier in Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where we will be based. In tandem, we will maintain for a short period a laboratory at the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine. 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 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:
- 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
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.