Cyanobacterial cell division
Automated segmentation, tracking, and quantitative analysis of cells and filaments to study growth and differentiation.
Read more ↗Bioimage analysis · Advanced microscopy · Artificial intelligence
Seeing cells
in space and time.
I’m Cesar Valades-Cruz, an associate researcher at the Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. I develop microscopy and AI-assisted bioimage analysis methods to understand how cells organize, move, and divide.
Research
From images to insight
My work connects optical imaging, computational methods, and cell biology across three complementary areas.
Polarization & super-resolution
Measuring molecular orientation and nanoscale structure in actin networks and other biological assemblies.
Read more ↗3D live-cell image analysis
Restoration, tracking, visualization, and data workflows for complex microscopy datasets.
Read more ↗
At the Institute of Hydrobiology
Quantifying life, one cell at a time
My current research studies how cyanobacterial cells grow and divide. Image analysis lets us follow individual cells within filaments and connect their behavior to larger biological patterns.
Explore this work ↗Announcements
Latest news
ManuscriptsBioImageIT reloaded - a new architecture in Journal of Microscopy. →Happy to share a new publication led by Arthur Masson, together with Sylvain Prigent, Ludovic Leconte, Léo Maury, Jean Salamero and Charles Kervrann.
This work introduces a new, red
ManuscriptsGloBIAS case study in Journal of Microscopy. →Very excited to share a new collaborative paper from the GloBIAS community, exploring the reproducibility of bioimage analysis workflows through a case study.
Assessing the reproduc
Manuscripts4polar3D in Nature Communications. →Very happy to share my latest co-first author publication in Nature Communications.
Manuscriptsα5β1 integrin endocytosis imaged by LLSM, published in Nature Communications. →Thrilled to share my latest publication in Nature Communications, a collaboration with Ludger Johannes’ team (Institut Curie, France)!
I contributed to Lattice Light Sheet imaging a
Selected publications
Recent and representative work
20264polar3D: single-molecule orientation imaging in dense actin networks↗2025DeepCristae: restoring mitochondria cristae in live microscopy images↗2025Genome-wide analysis of chromatin and nuclear proteins with Hi-D↗2022BioImageIT: open-source framework for integrating image data management and analysis↗20224polar-STORM: polarized super-resolution imaging of actin organization↗
About
Biology meets optics and computation.
My path has taken me from mechatronics in Mexico to biophotonics in France and Spain, then to cell imaging at Institut Curie and Inria. Today I work in Wuhan, China, with Prof. Cheng-Cai Zhang’s team.
I enjoy building tools that turn difficult microscopy data into useful biological measurements, and collaborating across disciplines to make those methods available to others.
Based inWuhan, China
Current roleAssociate Researcher · Institute of Hydrobiology, CAS
BackgroundBiophotonics · microscopy · image analysis