Alan R. Lowe

Department of Physics / QB3, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720

Research statement

I am an experimental biophysicist. I create and develop state-of-the-art quantitative measurement tools and use them to determine how biological machines and systems function.

The major goal of my research is to identify the principles and mechanisms by which an ensemble of molecules generate particular dynamic temporal or spatial patterns, and how complex functions emerge from that organization.


Advanced optical microscopy

I create and develop optical microscopes capable of resolving the position and motion of individual molecules inside cells in real-time. Recently we have built single-molecule tracking microscopes, capable of tracking sub-pixel movements of particles with high spatial and temporal resolutions (~6 nanometre, ~20,000x smaller than a human hair, at 40 Hz). I have also built "super-resolution" microscopes based on techniques such as PALM or STORM, capable of resolving the positions of hundreds of thousands of individual molecules. For an example please see our recent paper.


Image analysis

As part of the development of new microscopes, I also develop image analysis software, capable of processing the data required for image reconstruction or data analysis.

Since much of the positional data we are interested in is at the sub-pixel level we have to to recover that information. This requires automated image segmentation, and a process of refining and linking the position of objects, either in two- or three-dimensions. Other quantitative image processing problems such as image registration, drift correction and motion analysis need to be considered.


Other projects

I am also developing a three-dimensional scanner. The system uses a real-time video feed from a camera to image the scene and a rastering laser beam to make detailed distance measurements. By projecting the images onto the distance map we can recreate a three-dimensional space.

The system uses a open source microcontroller and a combination of Python/OpenGL to perform the processing and visualisation. Code will be available here soon.


Quantum Jot (Twitter feed)

Publications