Jason Swedlow


Jason Swedlow is an American-born cell biologist and light microscopist who is Professor of Quantitative Cell Biology at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, Scotland. He is a co-founder of the and .

Education and career

Prof. Swedlow received a B.A. in Chemistry from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1982. He then earned a Ph.D. in Biophysics from UCSF in 1994, under the direction of Dr. David Agard and Dr. John Sedat. After a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr Tim Mitchison at UCSF and then Harvard Medical School, Dr Swedlow established his own laboratory in 1998 at the Wellcome Trust Biocentre, University of Dundee, as a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow. He was awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship in 2002 and named Professor of Quantitative Cell Biology in 2007. In 2012, he was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Research

Prof. Swedlow's research focuses on mechanisms and regulation of chromosome segregation during mitotic cell division
and the development of software tools for accessing, processing, sharing and publishing large scientific image datasets. He leads OME, an international consortium that develops and releases open source software for biological imaging and , which commercialises and customises OME technology for use in academic and biopharmaceutical research (e.g., from PerkinElmer, from , and from Thermo Fisher Scientific. He participates in , , and is co-Founder of , a consortium of UK imaging scientists that develop, use, or administer imaging solutions for life sciences research. Using OME technology, he has collaborated with EMBL-EBI to develop the , a public data resource for reference images from bioimaging.

Teaching

Prof. Swedlow has served as Faculty and Co-Director of the Analytical & Quantitative Light Microscopy Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and participates as Faculty in the NCBS Bangalore Microscopy Course.

Family

Prof. Swedlow is married to Dr Melpomeni Platani, and has two children, Jan and Lena.