Rene Vidal is the Herschel Seder Professor of Biomedical Engineering and the Inaugural Director of the Mathematical Institute for Data Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has secondary appointments in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering. He is also a faculty member in the Center for Imaging Science (CIS), the Institute for Computational Medicine (ICM) and the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR). Vidal's research focuses on the development of theory and algorithms for the analysis of complex high-dimensional datasets such as images, videos, time-series and biomedical data.

His current major research focus is understanding the mathematical foundations of deep learning and its applications in computer vision and biomedical data science. His lab has pioneered the development of methods for dimensionality reduction and clustering, such as Generalized Principal Component Analysis and Sparse Subspace Clustering, and their applications to face recognition, object recognition, motion segmentation and action recognition. His lab creates new technologies for a variety of biomedical applications, including detection, classification and tracking of blood cells in holographic images, classification of embryonic cardio-myocytes in optical images, and assessment of surgical skill in surgical videos.