As always the summer has flown by and we find ourselves asking - where did the time go???  As we round out the end of our summer undergraduate researchers time in lab, we wanted to take some time to recognize them for their awesome achievements! This summer we had two incredible teams of summer undergraduates - the biology team and the engineering team. We are going to miss these awesome people so much!!!!  

Olivia is a Plant Science undergraduate here at UD.  She has been with the lab since early 2020 and stuck with us through the pandemic. This summer she was awarded a College of Agriculture and Natural Resources Unique Strengths summer fellowship!  Her summer research looked at the expression of maize mechanosensitive ion channels (MSL) in aerial and subterranean brace roots. 

Miranda is a Plant Science undergraduate here at UD.  This summer she tackled the challenges of working on our maize and sorghum fields. She tirelessly labeled plants, bagged sorghum, weeded our fields, and took meticulous phenotyping notes for postdoc Ashley Hostetler's project!   

Talia is a Plant Science undergraduate here at UD.  In a deviation from our normal work, Talia brought her own project to the lab! Talia has been investigating the metabolite profiles of two different pomegranate cultivars. She received the McNair Summer Scholars award to support this work.  Special shoutout to Dr. Nox Makunga (Stellenbosch U) and Dr. John Chater (U Florida) who have made this summer project possible through providing protocols, pomegranates and helpful discussions!

We had an awesome team of engineers contributing to our work this summer. From left to right:  Joe Cristiano is an undergraduate in Electrical and Computer Engineering here at UD; Anthony Jiang is an undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering here at UD;  Parker Grobe is a 4+1 who is about to start his MS degree in Mechanical Engineering here at UD.  I cannot say enough about how critical this team has been to our summer successes!  They tackled a slew of problems - from our version of ROS no longer being supported to designing and building new test frames and so much more.  

 TimIn the past couple of weeks we wrapped up our Spring 2022 semester! It was a bittersweet end to the semester as we said farewell to grad student Stephen Smith.  Stephen has been with us since 2019 and done so much great work and we will surely miss him!

But the sweet side is --- The Sparks Lab is growing by leaps and bounds!!!  
1) We welcomed two new PhD students to the lab last week, Irene Ikiriko and K. Thanduanlung!  
2)  We have a new staff researcher starting in mid-July!
3) We're currently interviewing for a new Postdoc.
4) We have an awesome team of undergraduates in lab this summer:
An engineering team of Joe Cristiano, Will Koenig, Anthony Jiang & Parker Grobe; and a biology team of Olivia Hazelwood, Miranda Farnum, & Talia Collier!
5) Thanks to a generous donor, we will also have two high school interns in the field later this summer! 

Stay tuned for project updates and (hopefully) a "Meet the Sparks Lab" series! Time always gets away from us when we try to make these things happen! 

We are also expected the return of visiting scholars this summer! We anticipate welcoming Christophe Pradal in early July to finish up our Thomas Jefferson Fund international exchange, and Amanda Rasmussen in late July to kick off our Royal Society international exchange. We are so grateful for these international collaborators and their ability to come visit us!

Our corn and sorghum is planted and already out of the ground... let the chaos begin!!!  

Sparks Lab: Surely we have updated our website in the past few months...
Narrator: They have not.

We opened the lab website to find a draft post from last April starting with the above... that we never completed and shared. DOH.  So now we've been years since updating!  Where has the time gone?!?!?!

We wanted to take a moment and reflect on the past year. 2021 was a year of professional and personal challenges for many in the lab, but we made it through! And looking back there were some major milestones that we want to recognize:
- Dr. Lindsay Erndwein - the first Sparks Lab PhD student successfully defended her thesis last April! 🥳 Lindsay is now working as a USDA ORISE postdoctoral researcher in New Jersey!
​- We got not one, not two, but three new grant awards in 2021!  For full details, you can check out our Research Grant Funding page.  After years of grant rejections, we are delighted to receive this new funding and forever grateful to the reviewers and funding agencies that believe in our work.
- Along with this new funding, we've just recently had a slew of papers accepted!  Former postdoc Adam Stager had a Methods in Molecular Biology paper accepted, Current postdoc Ashley Hostetler had a Plant, Cell & Environment paper accepted, and Ashley & Lindsay were co-first author on a manuscript that was conditionally accepted at Annals of Botany!  Check out our Publications page for full details. So much to celebrate!!!
- We also have an amazing team of undergraduate and high school students that joined us for internships this past summer and have continued to do research in our lab this school year! We're grateful for their hard work and enthusiasm for science! 

As we look forward to 2022, we are optimistic for the future of the Sparks lab.  We have new people joining us - stay tuned for intro & bios later this semester, have new funding to be announced, and a few more papers in the pipeline! 

We wish all of our friends, collaborators, and colleagues a joyful 2022 and hope to see you all in person one day soon.  

Originally posted on May 4, 2020

Since our last post, there have been significant changes to the world. So first, we hope that everyone is staying safe and well!  We are all hanging in there, and Erin couldn’t be more proud of how well the lab has adapted to the work-from-home transition.  We have a weekly coffee hour just to check in and while we miss seeing everyone in person, we are glad to be doing our little part to slow the spread.


The work from home has allows for some exciting new opportunities and our awesome team members continue to shine!

• M.S. student Sarah Blizard was able to present her work in the remote Plantae Seminar Series last week.  If you missed it, the talk is available on YouTube here. Although her last experiments were cut short due to the covid19 pandemic, Sarah made great progress and is set to defend her Master’s in June.
• PhD student Lindsay Erndwein has been busy working on a paper resubmission, so look out for that to be posted on bioRxiv soon. She was also award a scholarship from the National Corn Growers Association to support her work on how plant herbivory affects biomechanics. Congratulations to Lindsay!

Other than that we are sorting through mountains of data we have collected on the contribution of brace roots to plant biomechanics the past couple of years.  We are working to synthesize this data for a deeper understanding of lodging-resistance and hope to be able to inform future plant improvement!  Be on the look out for some exciting new data from our lab soon.


In more good news, we are welcoming Dr. Ashley Henderson to the lab as a postdoc starting June 1st.  Ashley just finished her PhD at West Virginia University with Dr. Jennifer Hawkins.  Ashley brings a wealth of experience in sorghum, genetics and abiotic stress tolerance to the lab, and we are so excited for her to join the team. She will be working to expand our understanding of brace roots from maize to sorghum!
We look forward to seeing you all in the near future!

Originally posted on March 4, 2020

Happy Spring Semester!  The Sparks lab has had a busy and productive start to 2020!  If you wonder what we’ve been up to, here is a preview…

​First, for some personnel changes. At the end of January we were sad to say farewell to lab technician Noah Ouslander. Noah was the first undergraduate in the Sparks lab and stayed on for ~2 years as a technician.  He was instrumental in getting the lab running and we are sad to see him go. BUT Noah is now pursuing his passions in cannabis cultivation and we wish him the best in the next stage of his career!

Some major milestones were accomplished by the lab members in the past few months. MS student Stephen Smith received a College of Agriculture and Natural Resources Unique Strengths Fellowship to transition into the PhD program this coming Fall!  Stephen has really hit the ground running with his projects and we are excited he will stay for a PhD. MS student Sarah Blizard wrote a review on Maize Nodal Roots that was accepted at Annual Plant Reviews Online! The review is being copy edited now and should be available in May.
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Postdoc Dr. Adam Stager and Dr. Sparks made a second visit to CIRAD in Montpellier France as part of the lab’s Thomas Jefferson Fund project. They spent the first week at the iCropM conference, followed by a side event organized by Dr. Sparks and Dr. Christophe Pradal on Phenotyping and modeling of plant anchorage and physiology. This 2-day workshop highlighted the challenges in the field and featured excellent talks from a wide variety of scientific disciplines. The second week was spent updating and refining a plant mechanical model that will be used to identify brace root ideotypes for anchorage.  In the last phase of this project, Dr. Pradal and Dr. Christian Fournier will visit the University of Delaware in July!

Originally posted on September 20, 2019

Once again a post that starts with “where has the time gone”.  I don’t know how time flies so fast, but it’s already Fall!  Welcome to pumpkin spice everything (it really should be a national holiday). It was a busy summer in the Sparks lab as we embarked on our 3rd field season. Things seemed to run a little smoother this year then they have in the past (fingers crossed I didn’t just curse us).  I got an email the other day saying it was my 3rd field season, so I should have everything figured out – HA!  Maybe add a zero to that… Surely I will have it figured out by my 30th field season. 🙂
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In addition to our regularly scheduled research, we hosted Dr. Mandy Rasmussen in the lab for a couple of months this summer. It was a busy trip, but very productive.  Mandy introduced her expertise in physiology to our lab and we are hoping to have some exciting mechanics/physiology results soon. We also managed to submit a grant together and outline a couple of papers.

People-wise the Sparks lab welcomed a new postdoc in the mix in September – Adam Stager. Adam is probably familiar to you already. He’s been working with us as a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering for the past 2 years and we are delighted that he’s joining us for a postdoc.  After major field-prep, Adam did the first deployment of our brace root phenotyping robot. There are still some kinks to be ironed out, but overall a successful first run!

As we close out the end of a busy summer, the Sparks lab is gearing up for a great school year.  In June we celebrated the first birthday of the Sparks lab and had a great gathering of friends and collaborators. We are all excited to see what this second year brings.

First lab news is of departures and arrivals.  We said farewell to our summer undergraduates a few weeks ago, as well as Hyeon-Hye Norikane who was instrumental to helping get the lab up and running.  We were also able to welcome Noah Ouslander as a lab tech. Noah worked in the lab as an undergraduate for the past year and we’re excited to have him working full-time. Another new addition is Sarah Blizard, who joins us as a Master’s student after working as a lab technician for the past few years.  We are so excited for the future of the Sparks lab!

Other lab news involves grant funding! We’ve been fortunate enough to receive seed grant funding for our research from NASA, the University of Delaware Research Foundation, and the Delaware Biosciences CAT program.  In addition, in collaboration with Dr. Christophe Pradal, we were awarded a Thomas Jefferson Fund award to promote US-French collaborations. Funding includes support for a 1-month stay for PhD student Lindsay Erndwein in Montpellier!  Lastly, in collaboration with Dr. Ullas Pedmale, we received a NSF grant (#1755355) to look at the Mechanisms of Light Control of Root Growth. We are beyond grateful for the support of these funding agencies and can’t wait to see the results from these projects.
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Other than that we are collecting and processing data. We hope to have our first research publications out early next year, so stay tuned… This promises to be a busy Fall with students taking classes and Dr. Sparks teaching Plant Development and Departmental Seminar. More updates soon!  Hope everyone has a great semester!

​This post is part of a migration of posts from our previous website.

Originally posted on May 10, 2018

The first spring in Delaware for the Sparks Lab has been lovely!  As the semester comes to an end, we thought to share some of the great things happening to our group and what’s on the horizon…

First, congratulations go out to PhD student Lindsay Erndwein for her acceptance and scholarship to attend the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories Frontiers and Techniques in Plant Science course!!!  We are so excited that Lindsay will become an alumni of the @CSHLplantcourse and can’t wait to hear all of the amazing things she will learn.

Second, a big congratulations to undergraduate Sarah Kubat for winning a University of Delaware College of Agriculture and Natural Sciences Unique Strengths summer internship!  Sarah is a Plant Sciences major and has been working with us since the start of Winter Term. We are so excited that she will get to spend the summer in the lab thanks to this amazing opportunity.

Another new addition to the lab is undergraduate Kyle Ebersole who is joining us for the summer from Hagerstown Community College.  Kyle will be working with Nathan Harlan for the summer and we are super excited for his contributions to the lab.
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Lastly – be on the look out for Sparks lab members at meetings near you this summer.  Erin, Nathan, Lindsay, and Wenbo will be at the Mid-Atlantic ASBP meeting.  Nathan, Lindsay, and Wenbo all have posters so if you are at the meeting, come check out their work!  Then Erin and Nathan will be at the “big” ASPB Plant Biology Meeting in Montreal. Nathan will again be giving a poster, so come see the great work he is doing.  Erin will be giving talks at the Plant Biomechanics meeting in Montreal, and the International Association for Plant Biotechnology in Dublin this summer. Lots of travel and excitement for the Sparks lab this summer. 🙂
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Keep our eye out for our next post… “The Sparks Lab First Birthday” (yes, we are having a party).

Originally posted on April 5, 2018

As they say – “when it rains it pours”, and in the Sparks lab it is pouring amazing new team members!  This month we welcome Wenbo Zhao to the lab as a Master’s student.  Wenbo comes to us from the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology graduate program, and has an interest in Data Mining and Text Mining.  Wenbo will be co-advised with Dr. Cecilia Arighi and Dr. Chuming Chen, who will provide him with amazing guidance on building databases and data mining.  We are excited for the new and different skillsets that Wenbo will bring to the lab.
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We also just finished interviewing PhD candidates to join the lab this Fall.  We were lucky to have three excellent candidates come visit us in Newark, and are excited that one of them will be joining us this Fall.  All of the paperwork is in the works, and we will follow up with an official announcement after everything is completed. So, be on the lookout for another update soon!

Originally posted on March 14, 2018

Well it has been an eventful few months for the Sparks lab!  We are growing (plants and people) and starting to feel like a “real” lab!  This semester we have added Nate Harlan, a recent UD graduate to the lab. Nate will start his Masters Degree research in the Sparks lab in the Fall of 2018, and is taking this opportunity to get a jump start on his research and get acclimated in the lab. We also have Lindsay Erndwein joining us as a PhD student this semester.  Lindsay has a fascination with all things insect, so she will start a joint PhD project with the Sparks lab and the (Ivan) Hiltpold lab in Entomology and Wildlife Ecology. We’re really excited for the opportunity to collaborate with the Hiltpold lab and learn more about bugs! We also managed to convince Noah Ouslander to stay on with us after graduation as a lab technician. Noah was one of the first members of the Sparks lab and has been an exceptional undergraduate, and we’re really excited that he will stay on with us after graduation.
And with the arrivals generally comes the departures. The first member of the Sparks lab, Jon Reneau, will be departing next week to take a new job in the Controller’s Office and the Cost Accounting Department at UD. While we don’t understand what his new job will entail (too many accounting things), we are sure he will miss digging in the dirt. We wish him the best of luck with his new position and hope he comes back to visit!