Steve Altschuler and Lani Wu are Professors in Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco.

In this episode of The Microscopists, Peter O’Toole talks to Steve Altschuler and Lani Wu—two mathematicians who leapt from Princeton and Microsoft into systems biology, high-dimensional data, and cell imaging.

They share the (brutal) grad-school mailroom origin story of their partnership, how video compression work at Microsoft shaped their thinking, and the risky jump into biology from Rosetta to Harvard, during the early days of systems biology.

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