The team used techniques from statistical process control to monitor the performance of all of the robots, generated optimal designs for arraying experimental controls to detect errors, and created models that allow them to correct for errors after the experiments are done.
Congratulations to BME Ph.D. students Vasu Rao, Noelle Toong and Benjamin David on winning an Outstanding Poster Award at the Midwest Microbiome Symposium. Their poster was titled “Quality Control for Automated Microbial Growth Experiments.”
“This poster was a collaborative effort among Vasu, Noelle and myself,” David said. “Our lab creates robot scientists that design and execute their own experiments. Robots allow us to scale up the types of experiments that we are interested in, but they present unique challenges in terms of producing reliable data because they can make errors difficult to detect. Our poster highlighted three techniques we developed to both detect and correct for errors in the lab.”
The team used techniques from statistical process control to monitor the performance of all of the robots, generated optimal designs for arraying experimental controls to detect errors, and created models that allow them to correct for errors after the experiments are done, according to David. “These are all problems that only arise when we scale up our experiments, so these tools are especially useful for people who want to start doing high-throughput work,” he said.
“There seemed to be interest in our work from other grad students, professors, and people from industry,” added Rao. “Several people said that they ran into similar issues as we did and expressed interest in learning about our solutions. We also received several questions generally about our automated science and AI work, which Dr. Paul Jensen spoke about in his keynote talk at the event.”
Rao continued: “I felt that it was a great opportunity to share our work. Being recognized with the award is an encouraging step, as I look to improve as a scientist and as a communicator throughout grad school.”
“We were very excited to share our work with the microbiome community,” David added. “We received questions from people who were enthusiastic about the work and wanted to hear our advice about similar problems they have faced in the lab. Vasu and Noelle really deserve extra credit for their great presentations. I believe this was their first time presenting work at a conference, and I think their effort really stood out.”