Loic A. Royer

Dr. Loic A. Royer is fascinated by a simple but incredibly complex question: how do organisms develop from a single cell into a fully functional body with billions of self-organizing cells that form tissues and have different functions?

Dr. Royer is known for his work on building the first adaptive multi-view light-sheet microscope, a ‘smart microscope’ that adjusts its parameters automatically to maximize image quality. He is also a pioneer in applying deep learning and AI to biological imaging, and has a long standing interest in image visualisation, having founded projects such as ClearVolume and napari.

Dr. Royer has been a group leader at Chan Zuckerberg Biohub since 2017. He first studied engineering in his native France and then obtained a master's degree in Artificial Intelligence, specializing in Cognitive Robotics, followed by a Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from the Dresden University of Technology in Germany. He then joined Gene Myers’ lab, first at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus (Virginia, USA) and then at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (Dresden, Germany), where he developed novel technology at the intersection of computer science and microscopy. This included the first adaptive multi-view light-sheet microscope, which he developed in collaboration with Philipp Keller at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus. As a group leader at CZ Biohub, Royer and his team design state-of-the-art image processing and analysis algorithms, as well as advanced light-sheet microscopy, with the goal to solve open questions in Developmental Biology.