Dr. Mark Winter

Mark Winter began applying his background in Electrical & Computer Engineering to biological systems during his MS thesis at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, creating a new object tracking approach called multitemporal association tracking. He applied this algorithm to microscope images of mouse stem cell development and protein transport along neuronal axons.

Mark’s PhD work at Drexel University built upon this tracking paradigm to create a system for inferring the most probable cell segmentation using cellular lineages and tracking information. These algorithms have seen broad application in biological research from cancer therapeutics, aging and regenerative studies, as well as organism development analysis.

At the Department of Marine Biology at the University of Haifa, he will apply the same techniques to the study of calcium transport during spicule formation in the embryonic sea urchin. This work will focus on identifying calcium transport differences across multiple experimental conditions to identify the molecular signals affecting correct spicule formation. Understanding the molecular control systems for biomineralization in the sea urchin is a key challenge in developmental biology. This work may also have far reaching implications for our understanding of both invertebrate and complex vertebrate development.