Eliceiri honored as open-source hardware trailblazer

Kevin Eliceiri, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and medical physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is among the inaugural members of the Open Source Hardware Association’s new Open Hardware Trailblazers Fellowship program.

The new program, supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, provides $50,000 and $100,000 grants to researchers who are expanding open hardware efforts in academia. Eliceiri is a leader in developing both hardware and software to better study the cellular microenvironment.

“There is already widespread community support for making the protocols for any published scientific study open and carefully documented, but the hardware used for most experiments—whether homebuilt or commercial—can often be effectively a black box,” he says. “In this age of the quest for reproducible, quantitative science, the open-source concept should be applied to the complete system, including hardware—not just the software used to analyze the resulting data.”

Eliceiri leads the Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation and directs the Center for Quantitative Cell Imaging in the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education. He holds the Retina Research Foundation Walter H. Helmerich Research Chair through the McPherson Eye Research Institute at UW-Madison, is a member of the UW Carbone Cancer Center, and is an investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research on the UW-Madison campus.

A version of this story was originally published by the UW-Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education.