Carolina Wählby

Wählby is Professor of Quantitative Microscopy at Uppsala University and Scientific Director of the national SciLifeLab BioImage Informatics facility. Her work is entirely computational: the methods that turn microscopy images into measurements, for biologists who have far more image data than they can look at.

She leads work on AI for microscopy and digital pathology, and created TissUUmaps, a browser-based tool that uses GPU acceleration to make tens of millions of data points explorable directly on top of the tissue they came from, along with human-in-the-loop frameworks such as SimSearch and concepts for integrating spatial omics with morphology.

TissUUmaps began in 2011, when a collaborator who had invented a way to sequence mRNA directly in tissue sections needed computational tools to decode the resulting image data. That collaboration produced a joint paper on in situ sequencing in Nature Methods in 2013 and set the direction for much of what followed.

She holds an MSc in molecular biotechnology and a PhD in digital image analysis from Uppsala, and worked at the Broad Institute's Imaging Platform from 2009 to 2015 developing CellProfiler before becoming full professor in 2014. Her work is ERC-funded, and she received the SBI2 President's Innovation Award in 2014 and the Thuréus Prize in 2015.