Draft:Virginie Uhlmann

Virginie Sophie Uhlmann holds the position of Director at the BioVisionCenter located at the University of Zurich. Additionally, she serves as a Visiting Research Group Leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) based in Cambridge. Her primary research focus is on quantitative bioimage analysis, with a particular emphasis on machine learning and computational geometry.

Education
After completing her Master's degree in Bioengineering at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne during which she also worked as a visiting scientist with Anne E. Carpenter and Shantanu Singh at the Broad Institute, Uhlmann pursued her Ph.D. studies in Electrical Engineering at the same institution in the laboratory of Michael Unser. Her research focused on image analysis, particularly the spline and approximation theory. Uhlmann was honored with the Asea Brown Boveri Ltd. (ABB) Award for her Ph.D. thesis, which proposed a unified formulation of active contour models and introduced innovative, user-friendly computational tools for bioimage analysis.

Career and research
Uhlmann continued to work as a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Michael Unser before joining the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Cambridge as a group leader in 2018. In 2022, Uhlmann was appointed as EMBL-EBI’s first Deputy Head of Research.

In Cambridge, Uhlmann's area of research centers around bioimage informatics, which involves utilizing mathematical tools and computer vision algorithms to decipher information from bioimaging. Her research group engages in collaborative interdisciplinary projects that converge at the junction of biology, computer science, and mathematics. Since 2024, Uhlmann has been the director of the BioVisionCenter, a recently established entity that was co-founded by the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research and the University of Zurich. Its primary aim is to streamline the analysis of extensive bioimage datasets.

Uhlmann holds the position of associate editor at two journals, namely PLOS Computational Biology by the Public Library of Science and Biological Imaging by Cambridge University Press. Additionally, she is a member of the Bio Imaging and Signal Processing Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and is also a Member of IEEE.

Awards and honours

 * 2020 Asea Brown Boveri Ltd. (ABB) Award