Please join us for a UW Data Science Seminar featuring UW Biology Professor Lauren Buckley and UW Chemical Engineering PhD Candidate Cole Martin on Wednesday, April 23rd from 4:30 to 5:20 p.m. PT. This seminar will feature two different research projects supported by the eScience Data Science and AI Accelerator.
The seminar will be held in Electrical and Computer Engineering Building 125 – Campus Map.
“Automating assessment of butterfly thermoregulatory traits to uncover responses to climate variability and change”
Abstract: Heterogenous responses to climate change highlight the need to identify the underlying organismal mechanisms. Rapid progress in disseminating images of museum specimens affords extensive opportunities to assess shifts in functional traits across space and time to uncover mechanisms. A single butterfly phenotype—wing coloration—shapes organismal responses to climate change at both acute and chronic timescales. Dark wings allow Pierid butterflies to absorb more sunlight to heat up sufficiently for flight and associated fitness determining activities, but dark wings can result in overheating and damage during thermal extremes. We present a workflow to download specimen images from repositories, detect the bounding box of butterflies, subset images to butterflies with a standard resolution, classify whether the image is of a dorsal or ventral surface, and segment the butterfly wings. A geometric analysis then evaluates grayscale within the thermally relevant wing regions. We find that seasonal plasticity and spatial differences in coloration enable butterflies to balance flight capacity against risk of overheating. Shifts in wing coloration across decades depend on whether climate change poses an opportunity or a stress. Our project demonstrates the potential to leverage emerging computational tools and museum resources to identify the organismal mechanisms mediating climate change responses.
Biography: Lauren Buckley is a professor in Biology at the University of Washington. Her research integrates modelling, field and lab collection of ecological and physiological data, and ecoinformatics to examine how biology (morphology, physiology, and life history) determines an organism’s ecological and evolutionary responses to climate change. A focus is characterizing how organisms experience and respond to fine scale spatial and temporal environmental variation. Much of her recent work has entailed repeating functional experiments and observations on montane insects after several decades of climate change to assess ecological and evolutionary responses. The TrEnCh project builds computational and visualization tools to Translate Environmental Change into organismal responses and improve capacity for ecological and evolutionary forecasting.
“Quantification of HIV-1 DNA Isothermal Amplification Images Using Resnet-18 Networks”
Abstract: Achieving the United Nations' goal of ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030 will require 30 million viral load tests annually—yet current diagnostics fall short in speed, scalability, and accessibility. To address this need, the Posner Research Group has developed a novel rapid HIV test based on isothermal nucleic acid quantification via time-resolved fluorescence microscopy of nucleation puncta. Previous DNA quantification using counts of discrete puncta has poor accuracy at high viral loads, limiting the method’s dynamic range. This work leverages a ResNet-18 convolutional neural network to overcome this barrier. By training a convolutional neural network on both spatial and temporal imaging data, we dramatically extend the system’s dynamic range, achieving 95% accuracy across clinically relevant viral load classifications. This approach offers a promising path toward fast, low-cost, and widely deployable quantitative diagnostics.
Biography: Cole Martin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Posner Research Group in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Washington. His current research focuses on developing a quantitative HIV viral load test for use in low-resource settings. Prior to this, he helped create a rapid COVID-19 diagnostic that aimed to retain the sensitivity and specificity of PCR in the same readout format as lateral flow style antigen-based tests. Before starting graduate school, Cole worked at GlaxoSmithKline in vaccine adjuvant development. He holds bachelor’s degrees in chemical engineering and biological engineering from Montana State University and a master’s in chemical engineering from the University of Washington.
The 2024-2025 seminars will be held in person, and are free and open to the public.