I like working at the intersection of computer science and biomedical research.

I’m a research scientist on the FlyEM Team at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus. We use cutting-edge electron microscopy to image fruit fly brains at nanometer resolution. After extracting likely neurons from the 25+ Teravoxel image volumes (through our collaboration with Google Research), our team of bio experts proofread the results. The result is a connectome, a map of the neural circuits. Our work has been profiled in the NY Times, the Simons Foundation, and other media.

I’ve been designing the data systems that allow us to flexibly capture versions of our proofreading and all the data we generate while reconstructing the connectome. Here’s a post that gives an overview of our data management strategy.

I have two research goals in the near future:

• To create a github-like way of distributing published data and allowing pull requests of changes from other researchers.
• To develop interesting ways to visualize the richness of our nanometer-resolution, segmented image volumes.

Most of my time, though, is spent supporting the daily operations of our reconstruction effort. This includes building out a serverless data service (on Google Cloud Run) for our Clio platform.

I’m an organizer of the Janelia Scientific Visualization Interest Group. Feel free to watch our invited talks at YouTube.