The Rebecca J. Holz Series in Research Data Management is a monthly lecture series hosted during the spring and fall academic semesters. Research Data Services invites speakers from a variety of disciplines to talk about their research or involvement with data.
On September 20, Dr. Richard Barker, Research Scientist with the UW-Madison Botany Department’s Gilroy Lab, gave his talk, “Astro-Botany Lab: Undergraduate Research-Based Project Learning.” The slides from his presentation are embedded below. Dr. Barker discussed the growing research being done about plants in space, and what he is doing through Gilroy Lab to generate more interest in extraterrestrial agriculture. For the members of Gilroy Lab, understanding how plants grow in relation to their sensitivity to gravity is a key aspect of their research; by taking part in Data Carpentry workshops, he gained programmatic skills for processing, analyzing, and visualizing that data to better understand it and to share their research with others more easily.
The Arabidopsis plant is used to understand how plants grow in space, and to introduce students to astrobotany. This video shows it “dancing.”
Dr. Barker has also processed and created graphs from RNA sequence data from NASA, and made those accessible on the AstroBotany TOAST database. Because the data is all open-access, he has been able to use it to teach students of all ages how to process and analyze data programmatically, while exposing them to the fascinating and rich data that has been collected by organizations like NASA. He has begun collaborating with other groups, including the Boys & Girls Club of Dane County, to create games that incorporate this data, making the data and ideas about growing plants in space accessible for younger students.