Michael Liebling is a Senior Researcher at Idiap Research Institute, where he leads the Computational Bioimaging Group. He is also an Associate Professor (on leave) in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara. He studied Physics at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland) and received the MS in 2000, with a diploma thesis on computerized tomography reconstruction. He was granted the PhD degree (Dr.ès sc.) from the same institution in 2004 for a dissertation on Digital Holography and Image Processing that he completed under the advisory of Prof. Michael Unser at the Biomedical Imaging Group, EPFL. From 2004 to 2007, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the lab of Prof. Scott E. Fraser at the Biological Imaging Center, Beckman Institute, California Institute of Technology. In November 2007 he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSB, where he served as Assistant Professor and, since July 2013, as Associate professor. He joined the Idiap Research Institute (Martigny, Switzerland) as a Senior Researcher in 2015, where he leads the Computational Bioimaging Group. Michael Liebling is the recipient of the 2004 Research Award of the Swiss Society for Biomedical Engineering. He was granted prospective (2004–2005) and advanced (2006–2008) researcher fellowships from the Swiss National Science Foundation. He received a Hellman Family Faculty Fellowship (2011). In 2015, he was co-recipient of a Northrup-Grumman Teaching award. Michael Liebling is past-chair of the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Bio-Imaging and Signal Processing Technical Committee (BISP-TC, vice-chair 2013, chair 2014-2015, past-chair 2016), an Associate Editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters (7/2015-7/2017) and was Technical Program co-Chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging in 2011 and 2013 (ISBI'11, ISBI'13), conference for which he also served on the steering committee (2013-2015). He is the vice-chair of the IEEE Life Sciences Technical Community (LSTC) Steering Committee (2016).

Biological image acquisition, reconstruction, processing, and analysis. More specifically, he focuses on developing novel microscopy instrumentation combined with computational tools to quantify dynamic biological systems. Tools developed in his lab have enabled dynamic, multi-modal, and in vivo cellular imaging during embryonic heart morphogenesis.