Prof. Swedlow received a B.A. in Chemistry from
Brandeis University in
Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1982. He then earned a Ph.D. in
Biophysics from
UCSF in 1994, under the direction of Dr.
David Agard and Dr. John Sedat. After a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr
Tim Mitchison at UCSF and then
Harvard Medical School, Dr Swedlow established his own laboratory in 1998 at the Wellcome Trust Biocentre,
University of Dundee, as a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow. He was awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship in 2002 and named Professor of Quantitative Cell Biology in 2007. From 2021-2024, he has a part-time secondment as a Program Director at
Wellcome Leap, running the
Delta Tissue Program. He was named a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2012 and appointed an
Honorary OBE in 2021.
Research
Prof. Swedlow's research[1] focuses on mechanisms and regulation of
chromosome segregation during mitotic
cell division[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]
and the development of software tools for accessing, processing, sharing and publishing large scientific image datasets.[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] He leads OME, an international consortium that develops and releases open source software for biological imaging and
Glencoe Software, which commercialises and customises OME technology for use in academic and biopharmaceutical research (e.g.,
Columbus from
PerkinElmer,
CellLibrarian from
Yokogawa, and
Amira from
Thermo Fisher Scientific. He participates in
Euro-BioImaging,
Global BioImaging, and is co-Founder of
BioImagingUK, a consortium of UK imaging scientists that develop, use, or administer imaging solutions for life sciences research. Using OME technology, he has collaborated with
EMBL-EBI to develop the
Image Data Resource, a public data resource for reference images from bioimaging.
Teaching
Prof. Swedlow has served as Faculty (since 1997) and Co-Director (2009 - 2014) of the Analytical & Quantitative Light Microscopy Course at the
Marine Biological Laboratory in
Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and participates as Faculty in the
NCBS Bangalore Microscopy Course.
Family
Prof. Swedlow is married to Dr Melpomeni Platani, and has two children, Jan and Lena.