Birthe van den Berg

PhD student @ KULeuven

Birthe van den Berg is a fresh PhD student at the research group of Tom Schrijvers. She will apply recent functional programming features and research topics to the field of fluorescence microscopy. Birthe does research on DSLs and designing functional programming languages.

Experiment-driven observation of the natural world is a key driver of scientific discovery and innovation. Yet, the growing technical complexity of experimental equipment has become a pressing problem that limits the number and diversity of experiments that can be performed, as well as the institutes and enterprises that can afford them. This project identifies an opportunity to increase the rate of discovery and innovation by lowering the threshold for experimentation, exemplified in the applications of fluorescence microscopy, a key approach in the life sciences. Our solution is an operational, deeply embedded domain-specific language (DSL) in Haskell. We aim to tackle this problem further by advancing the state-of-the-art in programming languages and knowledge representation to automate the equipment control and allow users to state what experiments they want to conduct, rather than how to perform them.

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