When Adina Ballaban applied a recently learned platform from her didactic undergraduate classes to her lab research project, little did she know that it would be the start of what would become a sweeping change.
The start: easing manual figure generation
Adina designed a tool for her personal research use to automate figure generation from her generated and entered data sets. The platform, which integrated research and technology, removed the burden of repetitive, manual figure generation. It soon attracted positive notice and requests from her colleagues in the Rothenberg CURED Laboratory.
Expanding scope: reducing the detective work
As interest and use expanded in the lab so did the scope of the platform, which grew from Adina’s datasets to the current lab member datasets and then… to reaching further back.
“When people leave a lab, the data is still there,” Adina says, “We still have it, but it’s really hard to get information about it and find out the details of how they collected everything and what they did…We kind of have to act like detectives.”
Moving forward, the lab proactively compiling datasets into this platform will preserve valuable datasets and details and reduce detective work for everyone, increasing the ability to utilize datasets and leaving more time for data analysis instead of data archive hunting.
The vision: EGIDExpress for sharing data
The expansion in scope and utility in turn led to an expansion in vision. Not only a figure generator or dataset archive, the platform had a more promising, interactive role ahead.
“We decided to add all of the published data so that we could really share it with everyone,” says Adina.