Drs. Sabrina Leslie and Xin Tang receive funding through Grants for Catalyzing Research Clusters program to launch new research cluster

Dr. Sabrina Leslie (left) and Dr. Xin Tang (right)

Drs. Sabrina Leslie and Xin Tang have been awarded funding through the 2026/27 Grants for Catalyzing Research Clusters (GCRC) competition at UBC to launch a new research cluster that brings together advanced imaging and AI technologies to accelerate research.

The GCRC program, jointly created by the Vice-President, Research & Innovation and the Provost & Vice-President, Academic, aims to support interdisciplinary teams at UBC to explore new research areas and accelerate impact. Specifically, they define a research excellence cluster as “a network of researchers spanning multiple disciplines at UBC that supports the formation and maturation of interdisciplinary teams. Clusters foster partnerships and collaborations, develop new research questions, directions, and themes in research creation, address key societal and cultural problems that transcend traditional boundaries, and offer training opportunities for postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, while integrating and implementing principles of equity, diversity and inclusion within their activities.”

Titled Uniting and advancing self-driving labs with microscopy-driven analytics, this new cluster will bring together UBC researchers with expertise across computer science, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biotechnology. The project is being led by MSL faculty members Dr. Sabrina Leslie (MSL, Physics and Astronomy), an expert in single-molecule and single-cell microscopy, and Dr. Xin Tang (MSL, Computer Science), an expert in AI and machine learning for self-driving labs. Dr. Leonard Foster (MSL, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) is also a member of the cluster, lending his expertise in proteomics to the team, and Dr. Marco Marra (MSL, Medical Genetics) is one of the group’s collaborators.

“By integrating advanced nano-microscopy with AI, we aim to move beyond descriptive imaging toward systems that can generate hypotheses, guide experiments and accelerate discovery,” says Dr. Tang. “Our broader vision is to lay the foundation for self-driving laboratories in which imaging, computation and experimentation continuously inform one another.”

The challenge the team is trying to address is the difficulty of observing molecular interactions from start to finish. High-resolution microscopy can capture single-molecule and single-cell events and track interaction dynamics, however manual exploration like this is not feasible for some large research experiments and broader questions. By uniting this advanced microscopy with self-driving laboratories that use AI to plan, run, and learn from experiments, researchers can then focus on the results and their scientific applications.

“This collaborative work will accelerate discovery and translation to address challenges across fields,” shares Dr. Leslie. “This will include advancements in nanomedicines and delivery systems, including mRNA technologies, as well as carbon-based materials and bioproducts that can play a role in areas such as environmental remediation.”

Congratulations to the team for the successful funding of this exciting initiative, we look forward to seeing the outcomes of this collaborative effort.

Learn more about all projects funded through this competition