Laura Waller

Early life and education Waller grew up in Kingston, Ontario, where she attended Holy Cross Catholic Secondary School. She pursued all three of her degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a bachelor's degree in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science in 2004 and a Master's degree in 2005.

She completed her doctorate in 2010 under the supervision of George Barbastathis, with a thesis that developed new techniques to image phase and amplitude.

Career and research Following her doctorate, Waller joined Princeton University in 2010 as a research associate and lecturer. Waller held the Ted Van Duzer Endowed Professorship from 2016 to 2020 and was subsequently appointed to the Charles A. Desoer Chair in Engineering.

Waller's research group specialises in computational imaging, an approach that integrates optical system design with computational processing. Their work spans phase imaging, super-resolution microscopy, and lensless imaging, with applications in both biomedical and industrial sciences. She has developed machine learning techniques for 3D microscopy and her group maintains open source software for imaging applications.

In 2014, she received both a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship and a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Data-Driven Discovery Investigator award. Her National Science Foundation CAREER Award supports her research group's work building computational and experimental software for imaging 4D partially spatially coherent light. In 2017, she was awarded an investigator award from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to develop microscopes capable of imaging deep structures within the brain.

Waller was recognised as one of the MIT EECS Rising Stars in 2018. In 2024, she was awarded the Max Planck–Humboldt Medal by the Max Planck Society and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, cited as a pioneer of computational microscopy for combining computer science and simple instruments to make additional detail visible and to produce three-dimensional images and videos.

Awards and honours 2012 Ivan P. Kaminow Outstanding Early Career Professional Prize, The Optical Society 2016 Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award for Junior Faculty 2016 Best Paper Award, International Conference on Computational Photography 2018 SPIE Early Career Achievement Award in Academia 2019 Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, for pioneering contributions to computational microscopy methods enabling fast, high-content and 3D phase microscopy of biological samples and neural activity 2024 Max Planck–Humboldt Medal, for pioneering contributions to computational microscopy