Sara Richardson

About Me

I am a second year UCSD Bioengineering student and a Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Research Scholar working with Jürgen Schulze.

I can be contacted at serichardson@ucsd.edu or 858-539-9950.

Project

After the success of the Human Genome Project, J. Craig Venter launched the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) Expedition to collect microbes and analyze their DNA sequences. Along with the microbial data, researchers also collected various metadata (location, depth, microbe size, temperature, salinity, pH, DO). This project will create a 3D visulazation of this metadata through the use of visualization technology. The display can then be used by researchers as a visually immersive way to look for particularly interesting data sites or relations between sites, with the ultimate goal of finding microbes with DNA that produce useful proteins.

This is the map of the GOS Expedition, indicating sample points. I am working on the visualization of metadata from the red/yellow points.

Progress

Updated: July 9, 10:15

Week 1

Researched available information on GOS/CAMERA and related visualization

Drafted initial ideas for visualization with the OssimPlanet software

Met with Paul Gilna to discuss ideas for and focus of the project

Began reading up on C++ programming language

Week 2

Continued reading about C++ programming language

Attended "How to Conduct Research" by Prof. Trey Ideker as a part of the Calit2 Scholars Colloquia Program

Began working on CAMERAVis plug-in for OpenCOVER (Progress noted as CAMERAVis Plug-in:)

CAMERAVis Plug-in: Parsed GOS data file, Converted latitude and longitude to cartesian coordinates

Attended "How to Present Research" by Martha Stacklin

CAMERAVis Plug-in: Rendered data points on a sphere (yay!)

CAMERAVis Plug-in: Wrote code representing variations in temperature/salinity as variations in the sphere's color/shape (values are accurate but opencover does not illustrate this)

Created first draft of "Research Presentation I" Power Point