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Olivier Mirat

Olivier is a software engineer and data scientist who has been working at the interface of biology and computer science for over a decade. In Virginia Tech he worked in a bioinformatics lab and participated in the creation of bio-security software for DNA sequence screening that he later presented along with his teammates at the iGEM competition and at the FBI headquarters. He has also worked in an early stage digital health startup in San Francisco creating a web-based chatbot relying on an AI medical diagnosis engine and has worked on other independent digital health projects. Olivier started working on ZebraZoom during his PhD in Claire Wyart’s lab in Paris and now wants to make other labs and corporations around the world benefit from his many years of experience analyzing the behavior of zebrafish larvae.

Claire Wyart

During her PhD, Claire developed novel methods for controlling the architecture of neuronal networks in vitro and demonstrated mechanisms underlying the emergence of spontaneous activity. She joined UC Berkeley for her postdoctoral fellowship and developed optogenetic methods in vivo by taking advantage of the transparency of the zebrafish larva. In this small vertebrate model, Claire used optogenetics to study sensory-motor integration, analyzing the processing of visual, mechanosensory and chemosensory pathways modulating locomotion. Since 2011, Claire started her team at the Brain and Spinal cord Institute in Paris. She is interested in deciphering the neuronal circuits that integrate information from the brain, from the periphery and from internal cues in order to modulate locomotion and posture as a function of inner physiological states.

Research Labs that have supported the development of ZebraZoom

Wyart Lab, Brain Institute, Paris, France

(Primary lab behind ZebraZoom, since 2010 and until now)

The Wyart lab was responsible for initially starting the ZebraZoom project and has provided the vast majority of the funding necessary for the development of this software. Wyart lab team members were also vastly responsible for testing and giving feedback on ZebraZoom. The Wyart lab opened up all major axis of ZebraZoom's development and to this day, it remains the main lab responsible for pushing the development of the software on all fronts: tracking, kinematic data analysis pipeline, GUI (Graphical User Interface), and further innovations.

Nicolson Lab, Stanford University, United States

The Nicolson lab provided funding to push some of the development of head-embedded fish tail tracking. The Nicolson lab also got involved at a time when the development of ZebraZoom's GUI was just getting started and was only working with limited features on Windows and Linux only: their involvement was critical and very beneficial in creating a better version of the GUI that would also work on Mac.

Song Lab, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

The Song lab provided funding to create scripts to analyze sleeping and moving activity in fish. They are also mainly responsible for supporting the development of the newest "Fast and easy screen for any kind of animal" option in the configuration file creation system. This option allows a very fast and efficient tracking of animals' center of mass and can be used for genetic and drug screens as a free open-source replacement to commercially available systems.

Further Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Ante Sikic for developing the newest graphical user interface of ZebraZoom. We would also like to thank Feng Quan, Laura Desban, Martin Carbó-Tano, Mathilde Lapoix, Mingyue Wu, Adna Dumitrescu, Jenna Sternberg, Maxime Kermarquer, Maha Dhanasekar, Gautam Sridhar, Xinyu Jia, Julian Roussel, Teresa Nicolson, Yan Gao, Biswadeep Khan, Jane Yam, Na Guan and Jianren Song for letting us use the videos they've captured and for their help with the development of ZebraZoom. We would also like to thank Thomas Preat's lab and Nicolas Renier's lab for letting us use the videos they've captured.