Andrea Giovannucci receives funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has announced a new series of grants to support access to imaging technology and to increase regional representation of imaging scientists in the global community. Of the funding, $1 million will support 41 plugin projects for the imaging analysis tool napari, including BME Assistant Professor Andrea Giovannucci’s project titled “Real-time and large-scale brain imaging analysis with CaImAn and Napari.” Giovannucci will build a napari plugin to support the interactive visualization of largescale or streaming analysis of brain imaging data via his CaImAn open source package.

A community-built, Python-based, open-source tool, napari is designed for browsing, annotating and analyzing large multi-dimensional images. The grants will support development and maintenance of napari’s growing ecosystem of plugins, and Giovannucci is among the napari Plugin Accelerator grantees who are contributing to provide easy access to reproducible and quantitative bioimage analysis.

“Expanding imaging capacity for biomedical researchers requires advancing imaging software and hardware, expanding access to shared tools and resources, and building capacity for imaging scientists and organizations to advance research in their home countries,” said CZI Imaging Program Officer Stephani Otte. “We’re excited to welcome our new imaging grantees, from software engineers to imaging scientists, who are furthering the boundaries of understanding health and disease.”