Researcher Spotlights

Sam Stickley
Sam is a PhD candidate working in Jennifer Fraterrigo's landscape ecology lab in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. He earned his B.S. degree from Colorado State University and M.S. degree in Environmental Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University. Sam is interested in prioritizing conservation efforts, and his current research involves the use of geospatial datasets to predict microclimate for use in species distribution modeling of plethodontid salamanders in southern Appalachia.
What influenced your decision to deposit your data in the Illinois Data Bank? Is there anything else you would like to share about the Research Data Service, Illinois Data Bank or your research?
This dataset was developed as a collaborative effort from multiple people, so we were interested in storing our data in one secure place as a long-term backup and we needed to fulfill data storage requirements for publication. Illinois Data Bank was great to work with and very thoroughly checked our data to make sure we did not have any errors before submission which was appreciated.

Tandy Warnow
Tandy is the Founder Professor of Engineering. Her primary appointment is in Computer Science, but she is a member of many other departments and programs at the U of I. She received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1994, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Award in Science and Engineering in 1996, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship in 2006, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for 2011. Her research areas are: bioinformatics and computational biology; machine learning and statistical inference; and discrete algorithms on big data.
What do you see as the primary benefit to archiving your data in a repository?
We do a huge amount of simulation and testing to understand methods and how methods work on datasets. I’ve never had to store this amount of data. Having data-sharing resources available is an unbelievably helpful and necessary thing for us in terms of transparency and the data being usable in the research community.

Carmen Ugarte
Carmen is a Research Specialist, Sustainable Agriculture and Soil Biology at NRES. Her research focuses on understanding the effects of soil management practices on soil quality and function. She is especially interested in studying the dynamics of soil food webs and their influence on soil ecosystem services such as nutrient cycling, carbon storage, and the regulation of population densities of deleterious soil organisms. Her work includes basic and applied research at different scales in the regional and national levels in agronomic and natural systems.
What do you see as the primary benefit to YOU of archiving your data in a repository? Is there anything else you would like to share?
As we strive to increase the transparency and reproducibility of our findings, data sharing is becoming the norm in the scientific community. By using the Illinois Data Bank to curate and safely archive my datasets, I am able to make my datasets publicly and readily available, and researchers can use it for multiple applications within the discipline.
The learning experience that one gets during the curation process enables researchers to build more comprehensive metadata structures and improved data management plans that may influence how we collect and share data in the future.
The learning experience that one gets during the curation process enables researchers to build more comprehensive metadata structures and improved data management plans that may influence how we collect and share data in the future.

Christie Wiley
Christie received her MSLS from Florida State University with a concentration in Information Architecture. Before joining the University Library, she was a librarian at NOAA Miami Regional Library. Christie joined the University Library in 2013 and is the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Data Services Librarian. Her research focuses on data management practices, the implementation of data services programs, and uses of institutional repositories.
What do you see as the primary benefit to YOU of archiving your data in a repository?
The primary benefit of archiving my data in the repository is that it allows me to share it with other interested researchers and increase visibility. There are a lot of perspectives on usage statistics in campus repositories. Sharing the work allows for the conversations to continue and provides opportunities for new ideas, improvement, and innovation.

Heidi Imker
Heidi Imker is the Director of the Research Data Service at Illinois and an Associate Professor at the University Library. Prior to joining the Library, Heidi was the Executive Director of the Enzyme Function Initiative, a large-scale collaborative center funded by the National Institutes of Health. Heidi holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Illinois and did her postdoctoral research at the Harvard Medical School. Her current research focuses on understanding and improving data management, sharing, and archiving practices.
What do you see as the primary benefit to you of archiving your data in a repository?
This data was collected from heterogeneous sources to examine the vigorous proliferation of open, online databases published a popular journal over the past 25 years. Sustaining such resources is a challenge that will only grow in magnitude as data sharing becomes increasingly more common across many disciplines. I want to enable research in this area and believe this data can be used to address additional questions. Being familiar with those supporting the Illinois Data Bank (full disclosure, I’m the team leader), I have complete confidence and respect for the curators and developers that stand behind this service. I also find myself returning to the data archived here as an authoritative copy simply out of convenience.

Jodi Schneider
Jodi is Assistant Professor of School of Information Sciences (iSchool), where she teaches classes in Information Organization and Access as well as in Information Modeling. She also affiliates with Infomatics; Beckman Institute; Health Care Engineering Systems Center; the European Union Center; and UIC Department of Psychiatry. Her research focus including: Linked data (ontologies, metadata, Semantic Web); argumentation and evidence; scholarly communication; knowledge organization; computer-supported cooperative work; biomedical informatics; science of science.
What do you see as the primary benefit to you of archiving your data in a repository AND what influenced your decision to deposit your data in the Illinois Data Bank?
Archiving data makes the processes used in our work very explicit. It also means nobody has to ask me: Can I have the data? Yes! It's already public.
I really appreciate the library's professional review: if Data Bank staff find the formats or organization of my data confusing, my colleagues would, too. On the other hand, my research focuses on the medical literature. Reproducibility is an increasing concern in medicine, and I feel it's my responsibility to make my own research as reproducible as possible.
I really appreciate the library's professional review: if Data Bank staff find the formats or organization of my data confusing, my colleagues would, too. On the other hand, my research focuses on the medical literature. Reproducibility is an increasing concern in medicine, and I feel it's my responsibility to make my own research as reproducible as possible.

Lindsay Clark
I am a plant geneticist with particular interests in polyploidy, population genetics, and the development of novel algorithms and software for the analysis of molecular markers. I am currently a research specialist in the lab of Prof. Erik Sacks in the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I study genetic and phenotypic diversity of Miscanthus, a perennial grass used for bioenergy and biomass, and have made discoveries about its evolutionary history in the wild and in cultivation.
How did you decide that the Data Bank was the best place to put the data?
The Data Bank is free, and it allows any type of data, which is great. [...] We liked that we could put essentially any information in there that we wanted, including the original handwritten field notes. Having that in the same repository as the genetic data, the phenotypes, the R scripts for data analysis - the paper explains everything from field observations to how to sequence the DNA. We have a broad range of data types all in one repository, which is great. I also really like the ability to link to other datasets; the raw DNA sequence data is many gigabytes and that's stored in NCBI, but we can put a link from this dataset back to NCBI as well.

Bryan M. Reiley
A graduate student at the University of Illinois / Illinois Natural History Survey, Reiley is working on his PhD in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences. His recent work found population declines of Swainson's warblers following catastrophic flooding events.
What influenced your decision to deposit your data in the Illinois Data Bank?
While I found many options available to store my data online, the cost was prohibitive for my tight graduate student budget and my project did not have funds to cover the cost of data storage. As I looked for more economical options I was surprised and happy to find that the U of I had an option that was free to students and faculty.

Sara Benson
Sara is a lawyer with ten years of experience teaching at at the University of Illinois College of Law. Prior to joining the College of Law, she worked both in a large international law firm and a small boutique non-profit law firm. Currently, Sara is the Copyright Librarian at the University Library at Urbana-Champaign. The ultimate goal of her research agenda is to shape the future of copyright policy by examining both on-the-ground practice in libraries and museums and the socio-political guiding principles behind such practices.
What do you see as the primary benefit to you of archiving your data in a repository? What influenced your decision to deposit your data in the Illinois Data Bank?
The primary benefit to me is to keep my data protected in a safe place so that I can access it in the future should I wish to build on that research.
I deposited my data in the Illinois Data Bank so that I can link the data to my research article and make it easily accessible to other researchers in the field. Sharing data in the Illinois Data Bank is easy and helpful both to the researcher and to other colleagues in the field. I highly recommend others to share their data, too!
I deposited my data in the Illinois Data Bank so that I can link the data to my research article and make it easily accessible to other researchers in the field. Sharing data in the Illinois Data Bank is easy and helpful both to the researcher and to other colleagues in the field. I highly recommend others to share their data, too!

Qian Zhang
Qian Zhang is a joint postdoc across the iSchool, NCSA and RDS. She is also a computational scientist and oceanographer in Physical Oceanography. Her multidisciplinary research covers quantitative data analysis and visualization, high performance computing (HPC), numerical/mathematical modeling and simulations of atmosphere-ocean dynamics, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Qian published the data from her PhD dissertation about the computational study of hydrodynamics in the Wax Lake Delta
What influenced your decision to deposit your data in the Illinois Data Bank?
The data from my PhD thesis represents 4 years of research work, the whole package of which bundles not only large datasets but also the numerical model and codes for data analysis and visualization. I'm happy to find such a reliable place to house my research data so that my efforts to create, document, and organize those data won't be lost, and that others can build off of all the work I’ve already done. I really hope that the Data Bank keeps growing so that more researchers become aware of the service, and that more datasets produced by Illinois researchers are to be explored, re-used and to inspire new discovery.

Loren Merrill
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Illinois Natural History Survey working with T.J. Benson (Avian Ecologist, INHS) examining the influence of different land-cover types on the health and condition of shrubland birds. Prior to joining INHS, I did a one year postdoc with Jennifer Grindstaff at Oklahoma State University examining the impacts of early-life stressors on short and long-term trait expression in zebra finches. I conducted my PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara on life-history strategies and ecophysiology of blackbirds. I am an avid birder and nature photographer and am happiest when immersed in wild places.
What influenced your decision to deposit your data in the Illinois Data Bank?
By making data available to other researchers through the Illinois Data Bank we increase the potential impact of our work. Other researchers can use these data as part of reviews or syntheses, which allows the work we did to become part of a larger study, and may garner additional interest in our project. Moreover, depositing the data provides a safeguard against loss of the original data, and preserves it for future uses.

Bernarda Calla
Bernarda is a Post Doctoral Research Associate at the Department of Entomology / School of Integrative Biology at the laboratory of May Berenbaum. She uses next-generation sequencing and bioinformatics to understand the evolution of herbivory, detoxification mechanisms, and the effects of natural and human-made toxins in insect genomes
What do you see as the primary benefit to YOU of archiving your data in a repository?
I have used other data repositories in the past. The Illinois Data Bank was a whole different experience. The data specialist at the repository helped me best shape my data to be usable by other scientist, none of the other services I used was so through and meticulous with the whole submission process. I am glad we have this service available.

Jeffrey Kwang
Jeffrey Kwang is a graduate student studying fluvial geomorphology in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering under Professor Gary Parker. He studies how landscapes evolve over geologic time by using both physically-scaled and numerical models. His goal is to determine and understand the fundamental processes that are necessary to create the structure of landscapes and drainage networks that we see here on Earth.
What do you see as the primary benefit to you of archiving your data in a repository?
The Illinois Data Bank helped me organize and annotate my data sets so that researchers in and out of my field could use and understand my data. Many publications are now requiring researchers to upload their data to repositories and make their data easily accessible instead of writing, "Our data can be obtained by contacting the authors." However, just because the data is easily downloaded, does not mean that the data is useful. I uploaded my data to the Illinois Data Bank not just to fill a requirement but to make sure that my data was publicly available, annotated, and useful.

Greg Spyreas
Greg Spyreas is a plant ecologist and botanist with the Illinois Natural History Survey. His research area is applied ecology that aims to bring about better conservation, restoration, management, monitoring, and understanding of natural areas and their floras/faunas, especially those of Midwestern North America. Greg published data from a longitudinal assessment of milkweed populations in the Illinois landscape and possible correlations with monarch declines.
What influenced your decision to deposit your data in the Illinois Data Bank?
Many Scientific journals now require that your data be archived and available upon request if you are to publish your work with them. Because the university system is so easy to use, it was an easy choice to use Illinois Data Bank. The data is now safely stored and readily available for researchers to use at any time.

Ryan Corey
Ryan is a PhD student with Professor Andy Singer in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research is on array signal processing and audio signal processing with a particular emphasis on augmented listening technologies such as hearing aids. He is developing wearable arrays with dozens of microphones to improve listening in noisy environments.
What influenced your decision to deposit your data in the Illinois Data Bank?
Open-access datasets are important resources in my field. They allow researchers to test new algorithms on real-world data that would otherwise be difficult and time-consuming to collect. A common data set can also provide a fair basis for comparison between different algorithms. Unfortunately, these datasets are often difficult to access and may disappear entirely if their creators fail to maintain them. By publishing my dataset in the Illinois Data Bank, I can ensure that it remains accessible to the research community for many years.