Clay Reid recently joined the Hopkins faculty, hired as part of the Petascale Neuroscience and AI cluster in DSAI. He previously was an Investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science and Professor of Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School.

Throughout his career, he has used high-throughput imaging approaches to investigate how the structure of neural circuits relates to their function. Starting 20 years ago, his group was one of the first to use volumetric electron microscopy (EM connectomics) to examine the interconnections of neurons in increasingly large networks, culminating in the MICrONS project (microns-explorer.org), which created a petascale dataset of visual cortex encompassing ~100,000 neurons and half a billion synapses.

His research program at Hopkins will be to create multi-petascale atlases of the human brain, with the long-term goal of tracing the network of individual axons—comprising tens of thousands of kilometers—throughout the brain.

Dr. Lyle Levine is a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the USA. Dr. Levine founded and co-leads several prominent national and international efforts in the areas of additive manufacturing (AM) and qualification and certification (Q&C).

As one example, Dr. Levine founded and co-leads the Additive Manufacturing Benchmark Test Series (AM Bench), a NIST-led organization that has built collaborations with more than 30 US and European research organizations to provide rigorous AM benchmark measurement data and challenge problems to the AM modeling community.

AM Bench is the world’s largest provider of AM validation data, with approximately 1670 unique user data downloads each month.

For further information on AM Bench, please visit our website at www.nist.gov/ambench.

Caroline Uhler is a core institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she directs the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center and is a member of the Scientific Leadership Team. She is also the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT.

Caroline’s research lies at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and genomics, with a particular focus on causal inference, representation learning, and gene regulation.

Caroline is recognized as a creative and innovative researcher and teacher at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and biology. She is a SIAM Fellow, a Fellow of the IMS, a Sloan Research Fellow, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. In addition, she has received multiple awards including an NIH New Innovator Award, a Simons Investigator Award, and an NSF Career Award.

Caroline holds an MSc in mathematics, a BSc in biology, and an MEd all from the University of Zurich. She obtained her PhD in statistics from UC Berkeley in 2011 and then spent three years as an assistant professor at IST Austria before joining the faculty at MIT in 2015.

Roseanna N. Zia is the Wollersheim Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Her research combines computational biology with physics-based models that simulate entire bacterial cells with unprecedented molecular detail. To explicitly represent every protein, ribosome, and DNA molecule as a physical object in a whole-cell model, her lab is integrating AI-guided tools with atomistic-resolution physics. This new class of whole-cell models promises to expand synthetic biologists’ ability to engineer bacteria for biotechnology, synthetic cells, and bespoke biomaterials. Current whole-cell models of E. coli and JCVI-Syn3A, the minimal cell capable of life, have revealed how colloidal-scale physics regulate protein synthesis rates and spatial organization. Her lab’s new models predict design conditions for bottom-up, ultra-simple synthetic cells, which are subsequently made by a team of experimentalist collaborators. 

Prof. Zia earned her Ph.D. at Caltech with John F. Brady studying colloidal hydrodynamics and completed postdoctoral work on colloidal gels at Princeton with William B. Russel before launching her faculty career at Cornell (2013–2017) and Stanford, where she earned tenure (2017–2022).

A Fellow of the American Physical Society, she has received two Presidential Early Career Awards (PECASE), ONR Director of Research Early Career Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, and NSF CAREER Award, among other honors. She has delivered over 100 invited lectures worldwide and served as Associate Editor of the Journal of Rheology (2017–2023). Her multidisciplinary work spans chemical engineering, physics, mechanical engineering, and biology.