Laura Waller

Waller is from Kingston, Ontario.[4] She studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She earned her Bachelors in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science in 2004 and her Masters in 2005. During her undergraduate study she spent a year at the University of Cambridge as part of the Cambridge–MIT Institute.[4] Her Masters thesis considered the design of feedback loops and experimental testing techniques for integrated optics.[4] In 2010 she completed her doctoral studies under the supervision of George Barbastathis[5] where her thesis investigated developed new techniques to image phase and amplitude.[1] She was a Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) student.[6] She played on the MIT Women's Varsity soccer team and was president of The Optical Society student chapter.[7][8]

Waller works on computational imaging.[3][9] She joined Princeton University in 2010, where she worked as a research associate and lecturer.[6] She joined University of California, Berkeley in 2012. Her research group focus on phase imaging, super-resolution microscopy and lensless imaging.[10][11] She is a senior fellow of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science.[12]

Waller was named as one of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellow in 2014.[13] That year she was also awarded a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Data-Driven Discovery Investigator.[14] She is a National Science Foundation CAREER Award holder, allowing her research group to build computational and experimental software for imaging 4D partially spatially coherent light.[15] She has developed machine learning techniques for 3D microscopy.[16] She was awarded tenure at University of California, Berkeley in 2016.[17] In 2017 Waller was awarded an investigator award from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.[18] Waller was awarded the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award in Academia in January 2018.[19] Through the development of hardware for computational imaging, Waller has made several contributions to biomedical and industrial sciences.[19] Her group develop open source software for imaging.[20] She is one of the MIT EECS Rising Stars for 2018.[21]

• 2019 Fellow of The Optical Society [22]
• 2018 SPIE Early Career Achievement Award in Academia[19]
• 2016 Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award for Junior Faculty[23]
• 2016 Best Paper Award, International Conference on Computational Photography[24]
• 2012 The Optical Society Ivan P. Kaminow Outstanding Early Career Professional Prize [8][25]