Wei Ouyang Receives Göran Gustafsson Prize in Applied Physics

Originally Posted on gustafssonsstiftelser website (in Swedish), on 9th May 2023

Wei Ouyang receives the Göran Gustafsson prize in Applied Physics at KTH. The prize provides Wei a worth 3 million SEK, spread over three years.

Wei grew up in southern China and received his doctorate in 2018 at the Institut Pasteur, Paris, France. After his PhD, Wei spent four years as a postdoctoral researcher at SciLifeLab and KTH.

Wei Ouyang describes his research as follows: My work is focused on building artificial intelligence systems for cell and molecular biology. My interdisciplinary group, AICell Lab, focuses on creating data-driven whole-cell models with the ambitious goal of constructing a human cell simulator. To achieve this, Wei and his team are working on innovations in data analysis, modeling and generation with an emphasis on the importance of autonomous systems for the collection of huge amounts of high-quality data suitable for training AI models.

Wei further says that his group is developing a fully automated imaging system, equipped with multiple microscopes, robotic arms, liquid handling robots and automated incubators. He highlights that AI models run in real-time to augment microscope views with artificial labels and annotations, enabling feedback signals to control cell growth, differentiation, and to adjust microscope settings to optimize phototoxicity and capture rare events in living cells.

The long-term goal of Wei’s research is to create large-scale whole human cell models by combining existing multi-omics datasets with new data generated by the imaging system. He envisions these human cell models as having great potential in cell experimentation in silicon, drug discovery, and contributing to a holistic and systematic understanding of the human cell.

Outside the laboratory, Wei says he enjoys exploring the Stockholm archipelago and snowboarding in the winter.