Federico Gasparoli, Ph.D.

Federico M. Gasparoli is the Director of the Core for Imaging Technology & Education. He received his PhD in Biophotonics from the University of St Andrews in 2018, where he developed and used custom fluorescence microscopy systems for biological imaging, with a focus on light-sheet microscopy, beam shaping, multi-photon excitation, optogenetics, and calcium imaging. He also holds an MSc in Imaging and Microscopy from University College Dublin and a BSc in Biotechnology from the University of Milan-Bicocca. After completing his PhD, he continued at the University of St Andrews as a Research Fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy, working on the development and application of single- and multi-photon microscopes for imaging biological samples.

Before becoming Director of the Core for Imaging Technology & Education in 2026, Federico joined Harvard Medical School in 2020 as an Advanced Imaging Fellow in the same core, where he supported researchers across biological systems and microscopy modalities, helping them design, optimize, and troubleshoot imaging experiments. In 2024, he joined the Image Analysis Collaboratory as a Research Associate, where he advised and trained researchers on bioimage analysis, reproducible workflows, tool selection, and quantitative imaging strategies.

Federico teaches and advises researchers through consultations, workshops, and hands-on courses on fluorescence microscopy and bioimage analysis. Since 2022, he has served as a teaching assistant for the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory course Quantitative Imaging: From Acquisition to Analysis, and beginning with the 2027 edition, he will serve as an instructor. In 2025, he co-founded and co-organized the Boston Bioimage Analysis Course (BoBiAC), a six-day course focused on Python-based bioimage analysis for fluorescence microscopy. He also helped create the BoBiAC Book, an open-source collection of the course materials used in BoBiAC and made freely available to anyone interested in learning bioimage analysis.His broader goal is to make microscopy and image analysis more accessible, quantitative, and reproducible for the research community.

Federico is also deeply committed to open-source science and believes that accessible, reusable software is essential for reproducible microscopy and image analysis. He is particularly passionate about using Python to connect microscope control, data acquisition, and downstream analysis into practical workflows. Since 2020, he has contributed to the pymmcore-plus organization, an open-source Python ecosystem based on Micro-Manager for microscope control, automation, and integration with image analysis workflows.

For a complete list of published works, go to PubMed.