Clarence Yapp, DPhil

Clarence Yapp is the Director for Microscopy and Computer Vision at the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology where he advises on the collection and analysis of highly multiplex image data (CYCIF) for studying disease. Recently, he has extended CyCIF to 3D imaging methods with strong collaboration with the Danuser lab (UTSW) and Gehlenborg lab (HIDIVE@HMS). Clarence comes from a robotics and biomedical engineering background, and used his experiences to develop computer vision tools and microscopy-based assays for studying diseases. For his PhD at the University of Oxford, he pioneered an optical technique that introduced non-permeable molecules into diseased cells using a multiphoton laser. This technique was later adopted to assist in drug discovery against novel epigenetic targets such as bromodomains and demethylases. He moved to Boston in 2016 where he had additional roles at the Image and Data Analysis Core (IDAC), and the Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology (ICCB-L) where he advised on assay design for the entire HMS and the nearby 3 research hospitals. Clarence frequently promotes open-source tools and is a lead developer in the popular MCMICRO end-to-end image analysis pipeline.