Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to announce that Micro-Manager, the open source software for microscope control and image acquisition, will merge with the LOCI/Eliceiri group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The LOCI/Eliceiri group is a natural home due to existing Micro-Manager-based collaborations and great synergy with their ImageJ/FIJI activities. The lead developer Mark Tsuchida, previously from Open Imaging, Inc. has joined UW-Madison this summer. Tsuchida and Micro-Manager co-founder Nico Stuurman from UCSF plan to release the new build of Micro-Manager soon. Additionally, we will be working on joining the open source imaging software discussion forum at Image.sc as the main Micro-Manager support system.
During its 14 year history, Micro-Manager has enjoyed widespread use in the microscopy community. Its success in large part is due to all of you, your use, ideas and support. Despite the technical achievements of Micro-Manager, its funding has always been a challenge. Meeting the resource needs of Micro-Manager requires us to be opportunistic and responsive to the evolving funding landscape. This resulted in Micro-Manager moving out of its original home in the Vale Lab at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 2015 to a company called Open Imaging, Inc. That experiment, while useful in that it continued development of Micro-Manager, demonstrated to us the great value of having the primary Micro-Manager development occur in an academic environment.
We are pleased to have the support of the Micro-Manager principals and look forward to new collaborations with all who want to see Micro-Manager improve and grow in its features and application bases. These organizational changes will change very little about how users get and use Micro-Manager. It will continue to be an open and free tool, with online support that we hope to grow and community contributions from all our valued academic and commercial collaborators. Please contact any of us with any questions.
Signed,
Mark Tsuchida, Micro-Manager Lead Developer, UW-Madison
Nico Stuurman, HHMI Scientist, UCSF
Ron Vale, UCSF Professor of Cellular and Molecular Biology/HHMI Investigator
Kevin Eliceiri, Walter H. Helmerich Professor Medical Physics, LOCI, UW-Madison