Winner of the CLS Innovator of the Year Award 2015: The Open Microscopy Environment – Will Moore, Petr Walczysko, Gus Ferguson, & Jean-Marie Burel – for OMERO.figure March 4, 2015 The College of Life Sciences is delighted to announce that this year’s CLS Innovator of the Year title has been awarded to the Open Microscopy Environment team – Will Moore, Petr Walczysko, Gus Ferguson and Jean-Marie Burel – for their development of the new application, OMERO.figure. OMERO.figure is a web application to create a figure for research output, which rather than being a ‘flat’ Photoshop image, is built from the original data. These can be stored, SHARED with a collaborator and may one day become the submission format for published figures. Professor Jason Swedlow, who heads up the OME team said, “Every scientist prepares figures for publication by creating print-ready representations of his or her scientific results. In imaging this invariably means the conversion of image-based measurements into non-quantitative pictures stored in formats like JPEG, TIFF or PNG. “The conversion of high-resolution quantitative measurements of cell and tissue structure and molecular composition into a compressed picture formats is the exact antithesis of what scientists are striving to achieve in their published results. OMERO.figure solves this problem; it is a web application that scientists use to build publication-ready figures based on data stored in an OMERO database.” OMERO.figure was first conceived by Will Moore, a PhD Biologist and software developer in the OME team. Will worked with several scientists across the College, demonstrating the application, taking feedback and then CONTINUING to hone its capabilities. Will then worked with OME’s UX and QA team, namely Petr Walczysko, Gus Ferguson, and Jean-Marie Burel to continue to develop and improve the application. Dean of Research Professor Julian Blow said, “The Open Microscopy Environment has been a great success story for CLS over recent years. The team’s commitment to a CONTINUING evolution of the software, based on user and technical feedback, ensures its expansion and keeps it at the cutting edge of technical innovation.” Tom Owen-Hughes Director of the Centre for Gene Regulation and Expression in which the Swedlow Lab is based said, “The OMERO.figure project is an incredibly useful technical innovation for Scientists working across the broad range of disciplines that involve imaging. To find out if it will help you check out the video demonstrations at http://will-moore.github.io/figure/.
