In a recent podcast, Peter Toole from the Microscopists interviews Emma Lundberg, a professor at Stanford University in California as well as at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. She is responsible for the Subcellular section of the Human Protein Atlas and the focus in the interview is on her life, career, the importance of image analysis and spatio-temporal omics and how 300,000 gamers helped in determining the subcellular location of proteins in almost 33 million microscopy images.

She describes how the 10-year old girl, dreaming to become a pilot, became a renowned researcher in the field of spatial proteomics and high throughput, high resolution fluorescent imaging, which among other things led to one of her career highlights, the release of the Cell Atlas (the Subcellular section) of the Human Protein Atlas in 2017. The interview also covers the benefits of crowd-sourcing and how AI has opened up both for automation of image analysis and for the possibility to ask new questions in human cell biology. Looking into the future, she highlights the study of the whole integrated cell, including investigating cellular states in various tissue contexts and to answer questions such as what can explain cell-to-cell proteomic variability.

Link to interview

Link to HPA Subcellular section