Christopher Noto
University of Wisconsin-Parkside, WI·Ecology & Evolution
The shapes of bones, teeth and other body parts reveal how animals move, feed, reproduce and interact with their environment. They also show how species have changed over time and how variable a species is.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
Computer Science
- Topics
morphology
3D imaging
micro-CT
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2028
What they work on
- Build a cloud-powered, open-source platform that connects biologists to JetStream2 cloud computing and the MorphoSource repository, so they can process and visualize large 3D specimen scans without specialized hardware.
- Develop cloud services and analysis tools that make it easy to exchange derived 3D phenotype data, the measured shapes of organisms, between labs.
- Train hundreds of early-career scientists to use 3D digital specimens, and run bootcamps that prepare graduate students and postdocs to create new analysis tools.
More about the research
Biologists increasingly capture these shapes with 3D imaging, from surface scanners to X-ray and UV microscopes. Many of these datasets are too large for an ordinary computer, however, and some require costly specialized software. As a result, many researchers and teachers cannot fully use publicly funded specimen data.
Why it matters
Free cloud access to large 3D specimen datasets could allow biologists at institutions without powerful computers or software licenses to use publicly funded morphology data in research and teaching. This would broaden who can study animal form and evolution, and make collaboration across multiple labs easier.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
David Andrew Hyde
Vanderbilt University, TN·Computer Science·Early-career
Develop optimized GPU implementations of grids, particles, octrees and linear solvers as the foundation of COSTA, an open cloud platform for physics simulation.
Sijia Zhang
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, NC·Computer Science
Develop teaching materials on planning, configuring and using cloud computing resources and frameworks such as Hadoop and federated learning for educational analytics tasks.
Akinobu Watanabe
New York Institute of Technology, NY·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Measure how brain and skull shapes have influenced each other's evolution across more than 350 bird species, using CT imaging of collection specimens and high-density 3D shape analysis.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Parkside: 1 labs on PI Pages.
Reach out
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