Kelsey J. Rudd

Research Specialist

phone: 608-265-5295 

email: krudd@wisc.edu

 

While attending UW for a BS in Botany and Biology, I worked in the Spalding Lab on Arabidopsis seed size QTL mapping. Upon completion, I moved to Florida to work in resource management in the Florida State Parks. It was an amazing experience, filled with prescribed fire, invasive plant removal, and a healthy dose of sunlight. After a year, I decided to come back to the Spalding lab and my native Wisconsin. 

Currently, I work on the Phytomorph project. Our goal is to develop technologies to quantify plant development through the application of machine vision, image acquisition, high throughput computing, and data analysis.

Specifically, I am working with computer scientists (Logan Johnson and Nathan Miller) and mechanical engineers (Ram Subramanian) to develop robotics in order to increase our image acquisition capabilities. The setup involves robotically moving a camera from each seedling to the next, and taking images. Our method allows for 36 petri plates to be running in parallel during one experiment. I am exploring the root gravitropism of the GLR family and the ABCB family of Arabidopsis genes. In addition, our lab is working with the Center for High Throughput Computing and the Condor software project to process and analyze our large sets of data.