Learn to Code

Do you code or are you interested in learning to code? Join us today and hear from three individuals that are at very different stages of their coding journeys. Becky Hansis-O’Neill (also our co-host this season) shares her experiences as a newbie who wants to learn more. Dr. Malia Gehan, a self-taught developer interested in studying plant phenotypes, explains why and how she and her colleagues learned to code and developed PlantCV. Finally, Dr. John Wilmes discusses his work as a professional mathematician and Machine Learning Research Engineer. Whether you are thinking about learning to code or an expert, we’re sure you will see a bit of yourself in this episode.

Guests

Becky Hansis-O’Neill: Becky is a PhD student in the biology department at University of Missouri - St. Louis (UMSL). She received her BS in Psychology and MS in Biological Sciences from Idaho State University (ISU). She has conducted research on topics such as behavioral pharmacology, developmental neurobiology, pollinator ecology, parasite-host interactions, population ecology, and stable isotope analysis. During her time at ISU, Becky discovered a passion for science communication while teaching undergraduate labs in general biology, ecology, and human anatomy and physiology. After her MS, she worked as the Education Specialist for the Idaho Museum of Natural History (IMNH), managing educational programs and designing and implementing digital interactive components for public exhibits. Because of this, Becky moved on to work at an exhibit design firm, Ideum. She led full exhibit design-build projects that integrated interactive multimedia, custom software development, and both print and digital content creation while managing the Creative Services department. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate at UMSL studying learning and behavior in tarantulas and bumblebees. Becky hopes to continue her career as a researcher when she is finished. In her spare-time she enjoys nature photography, dog training, gardening, and creating digital art.

Dr. John Wilmes

Dr. Malia Gehan: The geographical distribution of food and bioenergy crops is limited by several factors including temperature, soil salinity, and water availability. To tackle the daunting challenge of producing more food and fuel with fewer inputs a variety of strategies to improve and sustain crop yields are necessary. Increasing crop tolerance to temperature stress to expand the geographical range and season in which they grow is one strategy to improve crops. Many plant species can increase their freezing or heat tolerance with prior exposure to moderate stress conditions through a process called acclimation. Within a plant species, there is natural variation in both basal temperature stress tolerance, as well as the degree to which stress tolerance increases under acclimation. While some processes of temperature stress acclimation are well studied, there is still much to understand about both acclimation and the mechanisms that underlie natural variation in basal and acclimated temperature stress tolerance. Our research aims to elucidate mechanisms of variation in basal and acclimated temperature stress tolerance with the long-term goal of improving crop temperature stress. A major hurdle in advancing crop stress tolerance is our ability to assess basal and acclimated stress non-destructively. Therefore, our group is also focused on developing new hardware (Tovar et al., 2018) and software tools (Gehan et al., 2017; Fahlgren et al., 2015) for non-destructive phenotyping. For example, we aim to use a state-of-the-art hyperspectral imaging platform in the Gehan Lab along with analysis tools we develop in our PlantCV image analysis software suite (Gehan et al., 2017; Fahlgren et al., 2015) to identify spectral signatures of early stress response. This goal not only can improve how we conduct basic research, but has potential applications for field-wide sensing of stress. The research goals of our group can be summarized by: 1) The development of biologically relevant resources for high-throughput phenotyping; and 2) The elucidation of mechanisms of abiotic stress response and natural variation in stress response that are applicable to the improvement of crop species.