lab members

Estibaliz is a mathematician by training and earned her PhD in Mathematical Engineering from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain) in 2021, supervised by Prof. Arrate Muñoz Barrutia and Prof. Denis Wirtz (Johns Hopkins University). She was a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Ricardo Henriques’ lab in Portugal working in smart-microscopy and microbiology, supported by an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship and an FCT CEEC Fellowship. Estibaliz contributed new AI-driven methods for bioimage analysis across applications including cancer cell migration, phototoxicity, and microbiology, as well as novel statistical approaches to analyse big data. She has also co-developed widely adopted open-source tools such as deepImageJ, the BioImage Model Zoo, and DL4MicEverywhere. Her contributions have been recognised with several awards, including the SBI2 President’s Award and a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award. Beyond her research, Estibaliz has played a key role in advancing the bioimage analysis community through collaborative and infrastructure initiatives. She is a founding member of the AI4LIFE EU consortium, contributing to the development of standards, training, and accessible resources for the application of AI in life sciences. Her work emphasises openness, reproducibility, and usability, with the goal of lowering barriers to advanced computational methods in biomedical research.