The Bartesaghi Lab
Nanaline H. Duke Building
Room 132G
307 Research Drive
Durham, NC 27705
Lab Members
Alberto Bartesaghi, PhD (Associate Professor)
Alberto received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2005. He was an Associate Scientist at the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD between 2005 and 2018 and became an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Biochemistry at Duke University in 2018. His lab develops computational methods to solve the structure of large macromolecular complexes by single particle cryo-electron microscopy, cryo-electron tomography and sub-volume averaging. He is also interested more broadly in machine learning, computer vision, image processing, and high-performance computing.
Jeff Martin, PhD (Research Associate)
Dr. Martin works to support researchers and their research by developing a wide variety of software packages that can be shared with and used by other researchers in academia and industry. During his graduate studies at Duke, he studied algorithms for protein structure determination and protein design and implemented them using high-performance computing -- particularly multi-core parallelism, cluster parallelism, and general-purpose GPU computation.
Laura He (PhD student, Computer Science)
My current research focuses on how we can use deep learning and image processing approaches to achieve high-resolution reconstruction in the context of noisy and missing information from cryo-EM and cryo-ET data. More broadly, I'm interested in creating new data visualization tools that leverage my background in machine learning, signal and image processing, and statistical methods to help address structure and modeling challenges in the biomedical sciences. I received my BSc degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2022.
Ming-Yang Ho (PhD student, Computer Science)
Ming-Yang Ho is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science. His research focuses on developing efficient computer vision (CV) and machine learning (ML) algorithms for large-scale 2D and 3D cryo-EM/ET data analysis. More broadly, he is interested in scaling and optimizing CV/ML methods and systems for large data regimes. Prior to joining Duke, he conducted research at National Taiwan University (NTU) and the National Institute of Informatics (NII) on topics including conditional image generation, 3D image denoising, 2D/3D human pose estimation, and vision-language models. He has engineering experience in industry at Google, aetherAI, and Dcard, where he worked on large-scale ML systems. He received his M.S. in Bioinformatics from NTU and his Pharm.D. from National Cheng Kung University. He regularly serves on the program committees of CVPR, ICCV, and NeurIPS, and has received an Outstanding Reviewer Award from CVPR and a Top Reviewer Award from NeurIPS.
Alperen Tupurtu (Undergraduate student, Computer Science and Mathematics)
Alperen Tupurtu is an undergraduate student in Computer Science and Mathematics. His current research focuses on improving MiLoPYP, a self-supervised pipeline for molecular pattern mining and particle localization in cryo-electron tomography. His prior research projects outside the lab include a provably improved spectral-clustering algorithm and deep learning models for stroke segmentation from CT scans and breast-cancer detection from mammograms. He is a silver medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and an ICPC World Finalist. He also has software engineering experience at Getir, a rapid on-demand delivery company, where he worked on distance and time prediction systems and vehicle-routing algorithms.
ALUMNI
- Ian Laurence (Computer Science, CS+, 2025)
- Ye Zhou (Postdoc, 2024), now at Creative BioMart
- Hsuan-Fu Liu (Biochemistry, PhD, 2023), now at SAS
- Qinwen (Wendy) Huang (Computer Science, PhD, 2023), now at Bain & Co
- Jessica Tiu (Computer Science, MSc, 2023)
- Soumya Bodavula (Computer Science, BSc, 2022)
- Justin Mandel (Computer Science, summer intern, 2022)
- Jonathan Piland (Biomedical Engineering/ECE, spring/summer intern, 2022)
- Yeongjoon Lee (Biochemistry, rotation, 2022)
- Ruth Parsons (Biochemistry, rotation, 2021)
- Xiaochen Du (Chemistry, undergraduate, 2021), now at MIT
- Daniel Wesenberg (Biochemistry, rotation, 2020)
- William Luqiu (Computer Engineering, BSc, 2019)
- Niven Singh (Computational Biology & Bioinformatics, rotation, 2019)
- Brandon Dopkins (Biochemistry, rotation, 2019)
- Nikhill Pulimood (Computer Science, BSc, 2018), now Software Engineer AI Network Analytics at Cisco