My name is Cesar (凯撒) VALADES CRUZ. I am an associate researcher in the “Growth, Development, and Synthetic Biology of Cyanobacteria” team at the Institute of Hydrobiology (IHB), Chinese Academy of Sciences. My work focuses on developing a deep-learning framework for image analysis of bacterial cell division, using Anabaena as a model organism. Additionally, I am working on a new polarized super-resolution microscopy technique for microbiology.

I obtained a double PhD degree in Optics, Photonics, and Image Processing from Aix-Marseille University in France and the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Spain in 2014. Before joining IHB, I was a postdoc at the Curie Institute and Inria (French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation).

In 2019, I became excited about the possibility of coming to China after speaking with Professor Zhang Cheng-Cai. Unfortunately, the emergence of COVID-19 delayed my arrival until 2023.

Life in Wuhan has been exciting. I greatly enjoy the privileged location of the institute and the beauty of the lake nearby. Additionally, being in China allows me to spend time with my wife’s family during holidays and experience the warmth of Chinese family life. Moreover, my daughter is learning Chinese and becoming my personal language teacher.

Doing research in China is both challenging and motivating, especially in fields like optics and deep learning, where China is starting to take the lead. Although the competition for funding can be intense at times, I am proud to be part of an excellent interdisciplinary team, collaborating with experts in molecular genetics, structural biology, cell biology, and microbiology. I am enthusiastic about contributing my expertise in optics and image processing to our institute.