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.  

We are delighted to announce that the Sparks lab was awarded a seed grant from the Delaware Space Grant for the continued development of our 2D clinostat growth system!  THANK YOU to the DE Space Grant!  We appreciate all of your support, and cannot wait to add an imaging component to our 2D clinostat. 

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!

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!