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Lab News |
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Another year has come and gone and somehow it's been almost that amount of time since we've posted an update!! It has been a busy year for the Sparks Lab! We continue to expand - welcoming a new researcher (Dave Griffin), a new postdoc (Jingjing Tong) and a new PhD student (Eva Birtell) to the lab over the last year. Looking ahead we have two new PhD students starting in the Fall (Joe Cristiano and Bali Singh) and another new researcher (Emily Kennebeck) starting in August! We are forever grateful to the funding agencies who believe in our work and the collaborators who push the bounds of our research that allow us to reach even great interdisciplinary heights! With the hellos, we also have our farewells! Olivia Hazelwood, who has been with the lab since early 2020 pandemic days, graduate with a BS in Plant Science. She received the departmental faculty award for outstanding undergraduate in plant science and we couldn't be more proud of all she has accomplished! Her first publication was also accepted just a few short weeks ago (Publications)! We can't wait to follow along and see all of the awesome things that Olivia will accomplish in her career!  In other news, our summer intern numbers have also expanded dramatically! We have NINE interns joining us this summer. Four from the engineering side: Nicky Reigel, Het Patel, Sebastian Torres and Brandon Maravilla Garcia; five from the biology side: Emilia Pierce, Safiyya Haider, Austin Jensen, Taran Kermani and Mariela Alfaro Garcia. Major shout out to the Sparks Lab members who are spending their time mentoring these interns. We 💚 our interns!!!!
Stay tuned for summer fun pictures coming soon! In 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!!! This post is part of a migration of posts from our previous website. 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. 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!  For the third year in a row, Dr. Sparks and PhD student Lindsay Erndwein volunteered at the Sussex County STEM Alliance Engineering Your Tomorrow Event. This event is aimed at 6th-8th grade girls and to spark their interest in careers in STEM. This year Dr. Sparks designed an activity of “Exploding Pollen”! She had recently seen a talk from WashU graduate student Kari Miller in Dr. Liz Haswell’s lab at WashU. Kari’s work on the MSL8 mechanosensitive ion channel showed that Arabidopsis pollen mutant for mls8 will take on too much water and explode! Kari and Dr. Haswell were amazing to provide seeds that allowed this activity to happen. We are also grateful to Echo Microscopes for bringing their Revolve for the girls to view the pollen.  Looking ahead, Dr. Sparks will head off to the Maize Genetics Conferences in Kona, HI next week. This is hands-down the best conference for idea generation, discussion, and gaining new resources. We are so grateful that the Maize community has embraced our research and is so open with their resources and expertise! Immediately upon return, the lab will be moving across campus to a new building! We are very excited to be moving closer to the rest of the agriculture research on campus, and into this new space. Pictures to come! We also promise to provide project updates soon! 🙂 This post is part of a migration of posts from our previous website. Originally posted on December 16, 2019
Happy Holidays from the Sparks lab! Things are going well here in Newark! We had a new MS student, Stephen Smith, join us from the Bioinformatics program. Stephen will be working on the Environmental aspects of root growth and development and we are excited to have him on board. We will also have a MS student from Chemical Engineering, Rickey Egan, visiting the lab during Winter Term for a fun mini-project on oil palm. As the group continues to grow we are grateful for the talent and enthusiasm of all our team members. In granting news, we received funding from the University of Delaware Research Foundation Strategic Initiative Award in collaboration with Dr. Monique Head in Civil Engineering to start exploring the structural mechanics of corn using her expertise as a bridge engineer. This work will kick off in January, so stay tuned for pictures and updates on our collaboration. We further received funding from the Delaware Biosciences Center for Advanced Technology in collaboration with Dr. Alyssa Koehler, Plant Pathologist. For this work, we are partnering with a Delaware corn producer to study pythium infections and develop mitigation strategies for the Mid-Atlantic. We are delighted by this research support and excited to continue working with wonderful partners. Research-wise, we are trying to sort through the mountains of data that we collected from the field over the summer. As you all know, data analysis is an iterative process. For our field-based mechanical testing to understand brace root function, we took a second look at our data and decided maybe there is a better way to analyze it! So back to the drawing board. We are committed performing a robust analysis and that means spending time with our data and understanding all of the nuances. We’re optimistic to have this analysis completed in early 2020, so we can tell you more about how brace roots function to stabilize plants and what makes a brace root good at it’s job. Other research areas continue to progress as we continue to develop new technologies and explore their function in understanding plant growth dynamics. We are particularly excited about the “Plant Pusher” developed by a team of UD Engineering Senior Design students. These students went from idea, to concept, to functional prototype in one semester. We are blown away by their aptitude and progress. The goal of the project was to develop an automated platform for mechanical testing in the greenhouse. We are currently using this device to compare the mechanics of plants grown in the field versus greenhouse to finalize a methods paper on this topic. While several field-based mechanical testing devices exist (see our recent review on arXiv), the application of these devices to the greenhouse is limited. This device will allow us to test plants under abiotic and biotic stresses that we cannot perform in the field. This has expanded the potential research applications exponentially. Other than that we are gearing up for our move to a new building in early 2020! We are excited for the new space and to be closer to our colleagues in Agriculture. We’ve also added a new section to the lab website of Lab Pictures, so check it out. We will work to keep it updated with pictures of our science and fun happenings. We wish you all a happy and relaxing holiday season and a joyous new year! This post is part of a migration of posts from our previous website. 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. 🙂 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! We said goodbye to PSM student Josephina, who graduated and took a job at a local company. It is always sad to see lab members leave, but we could not be more happy for her with her new job! We are currently searching for a student to fill Josephina’s position (molecular regulation of root environmental responses). Hopefully there will be an advertisement out soon, but please reach out if you are interested! We are considering MS and PhD students. Scientifically things are moving along. Last field season we looked at how brace roots contribution to plant anchorage (spoiler alert: it varies by genotype!) and we are repeating that experiment this year. Our goal is to wrap that into a publication sometime this Winter. We wrote a recent review that is available on arXiv (http://arxiv.org/abs/1909.08555), and are hoping for a resubmission of the brace root mechanical testing paper ASAP. Lots of work to wrap up and try to get out into the world! Just keep writing… We are further delight to receive funding support as Co-PI on a NASA proposal recently award to Dr. Anjali Iyer-Pascuzzi at Purdue University! Such fun and exciting science, and we get to use the new toy we built (giant 2D clinostat): Last, but not least our lab is moving across campus early next year! Ahhhhhhhh. We’ll be occupying a new building on the University of Delaware STAR (Science, Technology, & Advanced Research) campus. This moves us closer to the rest of the College of Ag and our field/greenhouse spaces, which is really exciting. Staying optimistic that the move will result in minimal downtime and few problems. 😉 Happy Fall to you all!!! This post is part of a migration of posts from our previous website.  Originally posted on June 10, 2019
Wow – where has the time gone??? June 1st marked UD’s graduation and the 2nd birthday of the Sparks lab. This past year has flown by. After a year without any teaching responsibilities, Dr. Sparks spent her second year in course development land! Last Fall it was a split undergraduate/graduate course on Plant Development and this Spring was an undergraduate course on Controlled Environment Agriculture. While incredibly different, both courses offered Dr. Sparks the chance to become a better instructor and opportunities to get to know the amazing graduate and undergraduate students here at UD. Now that teaching has wound down for the year, we can take a short breather and plow right into field season! We had some really exciting results from last field season that suggest the brace root contribution to plant anchorage varies with genotype. This summer we aim to repeat these experiments and get some of our field-based phenotyping robots deployed. Science is chugging right along. We submitted two pre-prints this past year (Erndwein et al., https://doi.org/10.1101/547794 and Stager et al., arxiv.org/abs/1903.10608) and are hoping to get some more of our data out there ASAP! Dr. Sparks should be working on the figures now, but is likely procrastinating…perhaps by writing a blog post… 😉 We absolutely cannot wait for the summer ahead. Dr. Amanda Rasmussen from the University of Nottingham will be visiting for a few months (July-Sept) to show us the beauty of root physiology. We’re so excited to combine our mechanical results with her physiology approaches. In addition, PhD student Lindsay Erndwein and Dr. Sparks will be headed to Montpellier, France for an exciting collaboration with Dr. Christophe Pradal, and we hope to welcome a new Postdoc into the lab this summer. However, all of this excitement means we will not be traveling to many of our favorite meetings this year. We are sorry to miss you, but will catch you again next year! We wish you all a bountiful beautiful summer and may the maize be ever in your favor. 😉 P.S. Dr. Sparks spent an amazing 2-weeks visiting Agriculture Victoria this past May, so here is a Koala for your viewing pleasure. |
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