Anne Carpenter

Anne Carpenter is senior director of the Imaging Platform at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she is also an institute scientist. Her team of biologists and computer scientists develops image analysis and data exploration methods and software that are open source and freely available to the public. Carpenter is a pioneer in image-based profiling, the extraction of rich, unbiased information from images for drug discovery, and functional genomics. The team’s free, open-source CellProfiler software is used by thousands of biologists worldwide and their Cell Painting assay has been adopted throughout the pharma industry to accelerate drug discovery — including in two startups based on her research: Recursion and SyzOnc. She leads industry-wide consortia such as JUMP-Cell Painting and OASIS to generate valuable public datasets. She collaborates with dozens of biomedical research groups around the world to use image analysis to identify disease states, therapeutic potential, and gene function from microscopy images.

Carpenter is an NIH MIRA investigator, an NSF CAREER awardee, and has received recognition and research funding from numerous other groups including the Human Frontiers in Science program and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She was named to the top-100 list of AI Leaders in Drug Discovery and Healthcare by Deep Knowledge Analytics, and she is an honorary fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society.

Carpenter earned her B.S. from Purdue University and her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.