Founding Team
Why Verdant Exists
Verdant Center for Spatial Biology was formed by researchers with deep experience across biological measurement, analytical instrumentation, and real-world systems. Across laboratories and applied environments, the founders encountered a recurring problem: measurements that work under ideal conditions often lose meaning once systems become heterogeneous, constrained, or non-ideal.
Verdant exists to address that gap. Its work focuses on methods, reference data, and disciplined experimentation that preserve interpretability where complexity cannot be ignored.
Founding Principle
Verdant is guided by a simple principle: correctness under constraint matters more than scale or speed. When measurements break down in complex environments, downstream models, decisions, and policies inherit those failures. Verdant prioritizes methods that remain interpretable when assumptions of homogeneity, ideal sampling, and simplified models no longer hold.
Founders
Ivan Lebedev, PhD
Ivan’s background spans molecular biology, analytical instrumentation, and spatial measurement methods. His work has focused on identifying where biological measurements fail under real-world conditions and developing approaches that preserve meaning at fine spatial scales. He has worked across spatial transcriptomics, mass spectrometry imaging, and cross-disciplinary methods development.
Thomas Lane
Thomas brings extensive experience in experimental life sciences and translational research. His work centers on designing and implementing complex biological measurement systems with an emphasis on robustness and real-world relevance. His perspective is grounded in hands-on laboratory practice and in bridging conceptual insight with reliable execution.
Brian Turczyk, PhD
Brian’s expertise lies at the intersection of analytical chemistry and biological measurement. With deep experience in molecular detection, spatial analysis, and platform development, his work advances quantitative methods that function across heterogeneous samples. His focus is on specificity, reproducibility, and the technical foundations required for data to be genuinely trusted in complex experimental and environmental contexts.
Ivan Lebedev, PhD
Analytical & Spatial Measurement
Thomas Lane
Experimental Systems & Translation
Brian Turczyk, PhD
Analytical Chemistry & Quantitation
What Verdant Is Not
To avoid ambiguity about its scope, Verdant explicitly does not operate as:
- A proprietary platform provider or data marketplace
- A contract research organization offering paid services
- A commercial vendor seeking exclusivity or lock-in
- An advocacy group centered on a single technology
Verdant’s focus is on independent methods development, reference frameworks, and measurement discipline that others can build upon without capture.
How the Team Works
Verdant collaborates with domain experts, laboratories, and research centers to develop and refine measurement approaches where traditional methods fail. The work emphasizes documenting failure modes, clarifying assumptions, and building tools that preserve meaning under real-world constraints.
Operational Values
Verdant operates according to practical principles rather than ideological mission statements:
- Prioritize understanding where measurements fail
- Design methods that remain interpretable under constraint
- Share reference work without pursuing platform capture
- Collaborate without monopolistic intent
- Remain explicit about limits and assumptions
Why This Matters
Scientific measurement is often taken for granted until it stops working. Verdant exists to ensure that when biological and environmental systems exceed ideal assumptions, the data we rely on retains meaning. This supports better science and more resilient decision-making in domains where complexity is the rule. When biological context collapses, downstream conclusions become brittle, regardless of computational sophistication.