Laura Waller


Laura Ann Waller is a Canadian-American computer scientist and the Ted Van Duzer Endowed Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the Computational Imaging Lab. Her research focuses on computational imaging, developing techniques that integrate optical hardware design with computational processing to advance microscopy and phase imaging. She is a Fellow of The Optical Society and a senior fellow of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science.
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Early life and education

Waller grew up in Kingston, Ontario, where she attended Holy Cross Catholic Secondary School. She pursued all three of her degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a bachelor's degree in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science in 2004 and a Master's degree in 2005. During her undergraduate studies, she spent a year at the University of Cambridge as part of the Cambridge–MIT Institute. Her Master's thesis examined the design of feedback loops and experimental testing techniques for integrated optics.
While at MIT, Waller was active in campus life: she played on the Women's Varsity soccer team, served as president of The Optical Society student chapter, and participated in the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology programme.
She completed her doctorate in 2010 under the supervision of George Barbastathis, with a thesis that developed new techniques to image phase and amplitude.

Career and research

Following her doctorate, Waller joined Princeton University in 2010 as a research associate and lecturer. She moved to the University of California, Berkeley in 2012, where she was awarded tenure in 2016.
Waller's research group specialises in computational imaging, an approach that integrates optical system design with computational processing. Their work spans phase imaging, super-resolution microscopy, and lensless imaging, with applications in both biomedical and industrial sciences. She has developed machine learning techniques for 3D microscopy and her group maintains open source software for imaging applications.
In 2014, she received both a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship and a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Data-Driven Discovery Investigator award. Her National Science Foundation CAREER Award supports her research group's work building computational and experimental software for imaging 4D partially spatially coherent light. In 2017, she was awarded an investigator award from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to develop microscopes capable of imaging deep structures within the brain.
Waller was recognised as one of the MIT EECS Rising Stars in 2018.

Awards and honours