Visions of biological imaging drive researcher

As a young microbiology graduate student, Kevin Eliceiri met a professor just recruited to UW–Madison, a highly regarded geneticist and imaging expert named John White, now professor emeritus of anatomy and molecular biology. “Though John was well-known for being a biologist, he was equally well-known for being a microscopist and imaging innovator. He’s a researcher who can speak with depth and breadth to computer scientists, physicists and biologists alike,” Eliceiri says. Inspired, he joined White’s lab the next day.

During his graduate work in the late 1990s, Eliceiri became more and more interested in the computational and optical aspects of biological imaging, aided by a nationally funded microscopy center on campus then known as the Integrated Microscopy Resource. In 1999, he and White transformed the center into a collaborative multidisciplinary instrumentation development group and the Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation (LOCI) was born.

LOCI is dedicated to developing an array of hardware, software and other tools to improve imaging of biological samples in all types of research. As director and lead investigator for the last 10 years, Eliceiri has built the facility from the ground up and created a highly collaborative hub involving researchers from across campus and elsewhere, spanning numerous biological and clinical disciplines, computer science, and engineering, with the common goal of finding ways to shed more light — often literally — on basic questions of biology and medicine.

Rather than focusing on a single research question, Eliceiri tackles a range of real-world challenges that campus researchers identify in their work, for example, getting clear images of a dense tumor tissue or visualizing individual cells or molecules within the dynamic environment of a living animal.

The approach has been incredibly successful, says UW–Madison pharmacology professor Patricia Keely, one of five co-principal investigators of LOCI and a longtime collaborator with Eliceiri. In talking with colleagues at other institutions about a difficult research question, she discovered that one of the best imaging resources available was right here in Madison. Eliceiri helped design a setup with a multiphoton microscope that allowed Keely’s group see collagen proteins in live breast tissue and how they are altered in tumors.

“That’s been really instrumental for us,” Keely says. “Working with Kevin further, we’re trying to advance this into some patient trials, to develop technologies that would allow us to do this multiphoton imaging in the clinic… As far as we know, there’s no one else putting these techniques together in the way that we are.”

Biology can be a very visual science, and Eliceiri sees advances in imaging driving new research in much the same way that the recent genomics revolution did. “The biology matters first to us, and the microscopy is a tool to achieve new biological discovery,” he says. “The real excitement is what you can do with imaging and the tools of it, and I think the field has transformed dramatically just in the last 10 years with new technology breakthroughs.”

His enthusiasm is nearly tangible in his mile-a-minute speech, and one gets the impression that his brain is working even faster. In addition to his own considerable technical savvy, he excels at finding and bringing together the right people to really drive innovation, his colleagues say.

For example, LOCI is heavily involved with universities in the United States and abroad to develop new tools for image data management and analysis, as well as in education and outreach in these areas. With the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, Eliceiri is co-organizing the interdisciplinary MathBio2 Symposium to be held at the Fluno Center on Thursday and Friday, Nov. 19–20, which will focus on the need for multidisciplinary collaborations to improve biological imaging, analysis and data dissemination.

“Kevin is the instrumental person in getting collaborations and groups of diverse people working together. He’s amazing at facilitating that,” says Keely. “He wants everyone around him to do well and succeed.”

As a result, LOCI is a highly customized facility with unique capabilities — many built or modified by Eliceiri himself. “It’s evolved in the directions that the people who are a part of it need it to evolve,” Keely says.

Even as he shapes the future of biological imaging, Eliceiri is intrigued by its past. He has amassed an impressive collection of modern and historic microscopes, cameras, and other imaging tools, some dating back to the early 1800s, which now reside in LOCI.

“For the last 10 years I’ve been trying to collect some of the imaging history of the UW to make sure it doesn’t get lost,” he says. “This campus has done some remarkable things in the biological sciences with imaging, with great UW imaging innovators such as Hans Ris, and it is important to me to remember these contributions and learn from that history by preserving some of those early instruments.”