Principal Investigator Andrew Ault of LSA Chemistry sought to modernize the QCM Cascade Impactor, an Air Particle Analyzer used to measure aerosol concentrations. The original instrument was a decades-old analog system that presented significant limitations: it offered no flexible control over sampling parameters, provided no real-time feedback during operation, and outputted data solely on printed receipt tape. To address these issues, the development team engineered a complete digital overhaul. By integrating Digital IO cards and relays with a custom LabVIEW application, the team replaced the obsolete controller with a system that enables precise instrument control, real-time frequency monitoring, and the generation of electronic results for easy analysis.

Revel is a dating app developed for Dr. Amie Gordon and Dr. Elizabeth Bruch to study and improve romantic connections using scientific methods rather than profit-driven motives. Unlike typical dating apps, Revel aims to track and understand the full lifecycle of relationships, not just the dating stage. The app is tailored for university students, allowing researchers to gather comprehensive data and insights to benefit relationship science.

The WHIRLWell mobile app was created for Dr. Amie Gordon, who leads the WHIRLab in LSA Psychology. Dr. Gordon observed that many research studies in her field involve delivering scheduled surveys to study participants and requiring participants to complete these surveys within specific timeframes. In the past, text messaging has been used to send participants reminders to complete surveys at specified times, but the tools to do this can be both cumbersome and costly. Dr. Gordon wanted to create a mobile app that research participants could use to register for studies and then receive notifications when surveys related to these studies are available. This would additionally allow users to manage their study participation directly from within the app, as well as giving them the option to indicate their relationships with other study participants, which is especially important in studies looking into relationship development and dynamics.

The LSA Herbarium curates and maintains a comprehensive database collection of known vascular plant species growing wild in Michigan, based on the Field Manual of Michigan Flora. The original Michigan Flora website serves as an “evolving illustrated companion to the Field Manual, presenting photographs of the species and their diagnostic features, and build on the foundation of the Field Manual by incorporating updates and new discoveries.” The original website has become quite dated, however, and increasingly difficult to use, update, maintain, and secure. The Research Software Programming team worked closely with Michigan Flora curators to design and develop an all new Michigan Flora website from the ground up.

A graduate student was doing a project that necessitated identification of individual cells and their nuclei in microscope fluorescence images and quantification of image characteristics within the cell/nuclei areas. With hundreds of cells per image, tens to hundreds of image layers per 3D exposure, and many exposures for the entire experiment, the process of manually tracing each cell and nucleus area in each image using the ImageJ analysis software was incredibly time consuming. Our group worked closely with the lab to develop a program that would automatically identify, outline, and number the cell and nucleus areas, as well as perform the desired analysis, saving the lab countless hours of work.

The principal investigator (PI) wanted to incorporate a feature from a predator-prey dynamics simulator written by a colleague for a recent project into a plant-pollinator dynamics simulator the PI developed for an earlier paper. The team was able to help the PI identify and overcome a critical design problem that stood in the way of adding the desired feature to her program.

The researcher wanted to use an online platform to run an interactive experiment with two subjects remotely. The experiment needed to teach both subjects the words of a new language and then allow the subjects to describe images to their partner using the new language in a web browser. The Research Software Programming team was able to adapt the existing version of the researcher’s experiment to implement an online, multi-subject version using the LIONESS Lab platform.

The lab conducts many studies on the same population of monkeys and collects all of their data in Excel Worksheets. This works well for analyzing individual studies, but they needed a system for tracking subjects across multiple studies to compare their performance at different tasks. To help with this we created a database with a custom R library for adding and accessing census and study data. For lab members that are not familiar with R, or just want to quickly browse the data we created a website using R-Shiny.

The principal investigator (PI) wanted to be able to surround a mouse with a 4-walled display of synchronized striped patterns for behavioral experiments, and to sync the history of these displays with her neural and video recording system. The Research Software Programming team developed a MATLAB program to display the desired patterns on a set of four computer monitors arranged as a box, controlled by a fifth monitor, with additional signals wired from the computer to the recording system to track the timing and types of patterns displayed.

The researchers had created a Qualtrics survey to probe the participant’s voting preferences. However, the way this information needed to be displayed and the data the researcher needed to collect was not possible in a standard survey. The Research Software Programming team was able to help create a custom information environment embedded in the Qualtrics survey using Javascript and custom HTML.