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 Open Microscopy Environment and Glencoe Software. In 2021, he joined Wellcome Leap as a Program Director.

Jason R. Swedlow
Born	(1961-06-20) June 20, 1961 (age 64) Los Angeles, CA
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of California, San Francisco
Known for	Open Microscopy Environment (OME)
Awards	BBSRC Innovator of the Year, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
Scientific career
Fields	Cell Biology & Bioimage informatics
Institutions	University of Dundee
Thesis	Distribution and Dynamics of DNA Topoisomerase II in Drosophila Chromosomes (1994)
Doctoral advisor	David Agard & John Sedat
Website	http://openmicroscopy.org

Education and career

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 David Agard and John Sedat. After a postdoctoral fellowship with Tim Mitchison at UCSF and then Harvard Medical School, 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. From 2021 to 2024, he has a part-time secondment as a Program Director at Wellcome Leap, running the Delta Tissue Program. He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2012 and appointed an Honorary OBE in 2021.^[1]

Research

Swedlow's research^[2] focuses on mechanisms and regulation of chromosome segregation during mitotic cell division^{[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][excessive citations]} and the development of software tools for accessing, processing, sharing and publishing large scientific image datasets.^{[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][excessive citations]} He leads OME, an international consortium that develops and releases open source software for biological imaging and Glencoe Software, which commercialises and customises OME technology for use in academic and biopharmaceutical research (e.g., Columbus from PerkinElmer, CellLibrarian from Yokogawa, and Amira from Thermo Fisher Scientific. He participates in Euro-BioImaging, Global BioImaging, and is co-Founder of BioImagingUK, 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 Image Data Resource, a public data resource for reference images from bioimaging.

Teaching

Swedlow has served as Faculty (since 1997) and Co-Director (2009–2014) of the Analytical and Quantitative Light Microscopy Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and participates as Faculty in the NCBS Bangalore Microscopy Course.