Melissa Skala

About

Melissa Skala is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and holds the Carol Skornicka Chair in Biomedical Imaging. Her lab develops biomedical optical imaging technologies for cancer research, cell therapy, and immunology. Her current projects focus on tumor immunology and immunotherapy, cell-level metabolic heterogeneity, and cell-cell interactions. She leverages photonics-based tools for clinical problems such as quality control in T cell and stem cell therapies, designing personalized cancer treatments, monitoring diseases in the eye, and discovering new therapies for various diseases. Her research spans translational studies, hypothesis-driven questions, and algorithm or instrumentation development.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Biology
• Computational biology
• Physics
• Optics
• Materials science
• Nanotechnology
• Ecology
• Genetics
• Cell biology

Selected publications

• Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy: fundamentals and advances in instrumentation, analysis, and applications

  Journal of Biomedical Optics · 2020 · 826 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  SIGNIFICANCE: Fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) is a powerful technique to distinguish the unique molecular environment of fluorophores. FLIM measures the time a fluorophore remains in an excited state before emitting a photon, and detects molecular variations of fluorophores that are not apparent with spectral techniques alone. FLIM is sensitive to multiple biomedical processes including disease progression and drug efficacy. AIM: We provide an overview of FLIM principles, instrum…

  DOI

• Classification of T-cell activation via autofluorescence lifetime imaging

  Nature Biomedical Engineering · 2020 · 169 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Microfluidic tumor-on-a-chip model to evaluate the role of tumor environmental stress on NK cell exhaustion

  Science Advances · 2021 · 156 citations

  Solid tumors generate a suppressive environment that imposes an overwhelming burden on the immune system. Nutrient depletion, waste product accumulation, hypoxia, and pH acidification severely compromise the capacity of effector immune cells such as T and natural killer (NK) cells to destroy cancer cells. However, the specific molecular mechanisms driving immune suppression, as well as the capacity of immune cells to adapt to the suppressive environment, are not completely understood. Thus, here…

  DOI

• The NIH Somatic Cell Genome Editing program

  Nature · 2021 · 130 citations

  The move from reading to writing the human genome offers new opportunities to improve human health. The United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) Somatic Cell Genome Editing (SCGE) Consortium aims to accelerate the development of safer and more-effective methods to edit the genomes of disease-relevant somatic cells in patients, even in tissues that are difficult to reach. Here we discuss the consortium's plans to develop and benchmark approaches to induce and measure genome modifications…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An automated image analysis pipeline for wide-field optical redox imaging of patient-derived cancer organoids

  Scientific Reports · 2026-02-18 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Wide-field optical redox imaging provides a fast and accessible method to monitor metabolic changes in cells and has recently been developed for drug screening in patient-derived cancer organoids (PDCOs). However, manual analysis of wide-field optical redox images is inefficient and laborious for large-scale drug screens. Here, we developed an automated pipeline for PDCO segmentation, single-PDCO tracking, and background correction in autofluorescence images. This pipeline was tested on two imag…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01CA211082

  NIH · $3.5M · 2023

• CAREER: High-throughput Imaging of Drug Response in Tumor Organoids

  NSF · $509k · 2016–2021

• Functional optical imaging for rapid, label-free predictions of treatment response and clonal evolution in patient-derived cancer organoids

  NIH · $3.1M · 2023–2028

Frequent coauthors

• Alex J. Walsh

  164 shared

• David J. Beebe

  University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center

  137 shared

• Dustin A. Deming

  University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center

  129 shared

• José M. Ayuso

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  120 shared

• Amani A. Gillette

  Morgridge Institute for Research

  119 shared

• Tiffany M. Heaster

  99 shared

• Krishanu Saha

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  85 shared

• Kristina A. Matkowskyj

  Mayo Clinic in Arizona

  76 shared

Education

• Postdoctoral, Biomedical Engineering

  Duke University

  2010

• PhD, Biomedical Engineering

  Duke University

  2007

• MS, Biomedical Engineering

  University of Wisconsin Madison

  2005

• BS, Physics

  Washington State University

  2002

Awards & honors

• Morgridge Institute for Research, Carol Skornicka Chair in B…
• Retina Research Foundation, Daniel M. Albert Chair (2021)
• Fellow of AIMBE (2019)
• Fellow of Optica (formerly OSA, Optical Society of America)…
• Fellow of SPIE (2019)

Similar researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison

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• Justin Williamsh-72
• Sean Palecekh-71