The PhD defence and trial lecture will be streamed. The chair of the defence will moderate the disputation.
Ex auditorio questions: the chair of the defence will invite the audience physically present in the auditorium to ask ex auditorio questions.
→ Live streaming of trial lecture and disputation (will be available)
→ Request for thesis copy (available until the disputation starts)
Trial lecture
Time and place: August 21, 2026 - 10:15 AM
Lille fysiske auditorium (V232) - Fysikkbygningen
Title: "The potential and limitations of label-free imaging
for studying biological systems"
Main research findings
To study living cells, scientists usually stain them with fluorescent dyes that light up specific structures. However, these dyes are toxic and disturb the cells. This makes it impossible to observe the same cells over several days. This thesis shows that artificial intelligence can extract much of this information from plain microscope images instead, with no staining at all.
Computer models were trained to recognize subtle patterns in the shape and texture of unstained cells. They could tell early on which stem cells were likely to grow into high-quality cells for cell therapy, identify which type of tissue developing cells were turning into, and spot cancer cells as they died during immune attacks.
Even though the models performed well, they also showed clear limits: a cell's shape at a single moment cannot always predict what will happen next. Despite this, the work marks a key step toward gentle, automated monitoring of living cells. This shift could make stem cell therapies safer and cheaper, while helping researchers better understand how the body fights cancer.
Adjudication Committee
- Associate Professor Guillaume Jacquemet, Åbo Akademi University, Finland
- Associate Professor Caroline Beck Adiels, The University of Gothenburg, Sweden
- Dr. Marcel Moura, Department of Physics; University of Oslo, Norway
Supervisors
- Professor Dag Kristian Dysthe, Department of Physics/ The Njord Center, University of Oslo, Norway
- Professor Hanne Scholz, Department of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Oslo/ Oslo University Hospital, Norway
- Professor Anders Malthe-Sørenssen, Department of Physics, University of Oslo and Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NBMU)
- Professor Alexander Binder, Multimodal Machine Learning/ ScaDS.AI, Leipzig University, Germany
Chair of defence
Head of Department Susanne Friederike Viefers, Department of Physics, University of Oslo, Norway
Candidate contact information
LinkedIn: Franziska Jessica Schöb
Email: franscho@uio.no
Contact information to Department: Line Trosterud Resvold