Presenter

Ever since working on his first depictions of cell biology as a Medical Illustrator, Graham dreamed of being able to peer deep into a cell— to explore structural and mechanistic relationships across all scales as a means to better understand a cell’s inner workings. He eventually returned to graduate school for a second degree to establish protocols and develop software that could begin to assemble multitudes of fragmented data, spanning all of biology, into integrated whole-cell structural models. His former UCSF lab’s Mesoscope project and his current team at the Allen Institute for Cell Science continue this mission by uniting biologists, programmers, and artists to interoperate the computational tools of science and art. They built the Allen Cell Explorer website (allencell.org) to provide online access to a trove of volumetric microscopy images, analysis tools, modeling tools, and scientific summaries that describe the organizational diversity of human stem cells. Now, in 2021, they have begun an effort to refactor and democratize their data and tools to make them more robust, reproducible, and easy to use.