Aubrey Vanessa Weigel

Aubrey Weigel is Head of Data for the Alpha Cell program at SciLifeLab, based in the Department of Protein Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Alpha Cell is building molecular-resolution models of the human cell, bringing together volume electron microscopy, cryo-EM, light microscopy, proteomics and AI across the Swedish national research infrastructure. Aubrey leads the data effort: how the program's imaging data is generated, stored, standardised and made usable for modelling. She previously led the CellMap Project Team at HHMI Janelia Research Campus, where the team used advanced imaging technologies to study the ultrastructure and dynamics of subcellular organelles under both healthy and pathological conditions. Aubrey's research background is in biophysics, with an emphasis in microscopy, and her formal training is in physics and engineering. During her graduate work she was the co-discoverer of ergodicity breaking in cells along with Diego Krapf, driving a pivotal shift in the field of diffusion analysis in living systems. Throughout her postdoctoral career under the guidance of Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, she applied her training in physics and microscopy directly to answer biological questions. Here, Aubrey unravelled the underlying structure of the endoplasmic reticulum and revealed its complex dynamics. She also uncovered the nano-anatomy of early secretory compartments and discovered a new, dynamic organelle responsible for delivering newly synthesised cargo from the endoplasmic reticulum to the Golgi. At Janelia she led the development of an invaluable tool for cell biology, an analysis pipeline based on deep learning architectures for segmentation, allowing comprehensive reconstruction and analysis of organelles within entire cells imaged by volumetric electron microscopy. Aubrey is committed to integrating her multi-disciplinary training into facilitating large-effort, collaborative, team projects to take on challenging scientific problems and sharing these resources with the broader scientific community.