Clarence Yapp is the Director for Microscopy and Computer Vision at the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology. Over the past 5 years, he has been funded by the NIH/NCI’s Cancer Moonshot program where he advises on the collection and analysis of highly multiplex image data for generating tumor atlases for studying disease. Recently, he has extended this technique to 3D imaging methods. Despite training as a robotics engineer in 2006, he switched career trajectories to biomedical engineering and focused on developing microscopy-based tools 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. In 2016, he moved to Boston where he has had roles at the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology (LSP), 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 usually promotes open-source tools and is a lead developer in the popular MCMICRO end-to-end image analysis pipeline.
