Micro-intern: Structural Biology ML/Software (IAP-Alumni Host)

The New York Structural Biology Center is the East coast’s epicenter for high-resolution molecular and cellular imaging. Within, the Simons Electron Microscopy and Machine Learning Centers focus on cutting-edge applications at the intersection of cryo electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and machine vision. One such application is the Topaz cryo-EM object detection software. Topaz excels at identifying proteins in noisy images with few labels, saving microscope users and structural biologists significant time in manual labeling and processing.

In this project, the student will work with us to develop new features in Topaz such as the ability to pick multiple proteins from mixtures, a more effective GUI, or a Topaz server deployment. This project will largely focus on software engineering these features, but it will also include exposure to machine learning workflows and model development. The student will additionally learn about cryo-EM pipelines and applications through participation in structural biology and machine learning journal clubs.

We are looking for a student with a passion for solving biological problems using modern computational approaches. They should be comfortable with Python programming and have some familiarity with data science and machine learning libraries (numpy, pandas, pytorch, etc.). Experience in image processing or statistics are a plus.