The Michigan Flora app is a companion to the Michigan Flora website also developed by the RSE team. The RSE team worked closely with U-M Herbarium staff to develop this application, which is designed to work offline for easy classification in the field where internet connections are often unavailable. The app provides convenient access to thousands of plant species records, including detailed images, descriptions, and maps, and shares a unified database with the website to maintain data accuracy and consistency.

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.

Summary​

The UM Primate Behavior Lab studies the evolutionary causes and consequences of primate behavior and physiology, with much of its research focused on wild mountain gorillas monitored by the Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda. Gorilla Hormone is a data management web application that brings hormone assay results and other data about individual gorillas into a single, curated location for the lab. An early version of the application was prototyped by the lab but it lacked key functionality needed for use in production. The Research Software Engineering team worked closely with Dr. Stacy Rosenbaum and the Primate Behavior Lab to complete and enhance the site, adding a validated uploader for data coming from lab equipment, permissions-based editing, and views for sorting and filtering records.

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 was developed decades ago to serve 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 had become quite dated, however, and increasingly difficult to use, update, maintain, and secure. The Research Software Engineering 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 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.