Douglas Shepherd was born in Albuquerque, NM and went to the University of California Santa Barbara as a undergraduate where he studied physics. After a break from academia, he pursued his doctorate in single-molecule physics at Colorado State University under the direction of Profs. Alan Van Orden (Chemistry) and Martin Gelfand (Physics). He went onto a postdoctoral fellowship in the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT) and Center for Nonlinear Studies (CNLS) at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Working with Drs. James Werner (CINT) and Brian Munsky (CNLS), he built new tools to measure and model gene regulation in pathogenic bacteria.
Shepherd directs the Quantitative Imaging and Inference (QI2) lab, which he formed at the University of Colorado Denver Anschutz Medical Campus in 2013. In 2019, Shepherd and the QI2 lab relocated to the Center for Biological Physics and Department of Physics at ASU. The QI2 lab develops, adapts, and uses high-throughput fluorescence imaging methods and statistical inference tools to build a quantitative understanding of how cells organize into tissue and organs. The QI2 lab is a contributing member of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Human Cell Atlas, with a particular interest in highly-multiplexed single-molecule mapping of gene expression to infer cell type throughout the human lung.
The QI2 lab is seeking motivated postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students for theoretical or experimental work. If interested, please see the openings tab at our website and contact douglas.shepherd@asu.edu.