Photo: Bryan Goodchild
UMass Chan Medical School will serve as the central hub for a National Science Foundation-funded program aimed at creating the first standardized framework for persistently identifying, providing standardized descriptions and citing specific instruments being used to produce scientific publications and published data.
Caterina Strambio De Castillia, PhD, assistant professor of molecular medicine, received a four-year, $4 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to support her project, Imaging-PHD. It aims to foster more rigorous, transparent and reproducible scientific advances and promote the production of reusable data by creating clear, standardized records of the equipment used in research through assigning persistent hardware descriptors (PHDs) to scientific instruments, with an initial focus in light-microscopy.
"In science, everything is about data. You need to know the characteristics of the instrument that you use to produce that data. The goal of this project is to assign persistent identifiers and standardized hardware descriptors to individual instruments used for scientific research,” Dr. Strambio De Castillia said.
The project is funded by the NSF’s Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation program and is being developed through a team that includes Adrian H. Zai, MD, PhD, MPH, associate professor of population & quantitative health sciences and chief research informatics officer; David Grunwald, PhD, associate professor of RNA therapeutics; Alessandro Rigano, research software engineer in the Strambio De Castillia lab; James Chambers, assistant professor of chemistry at UMass Amherst; and researchers at the University of Vermont and University of California-San Diego.
“When it comes to scientific instruments, like microscopes, information regarding the capabilities of the equipment are often not available to users because some of the key configuration and performance details are frequently proprietary. This becomes a real issue in publicly funded science, where transparency, rigor and reproducibility matter. That’s why we’ve been working as a community—with imaging scientists, microscopy experts, software developers and, crucially, manufacturers—to find a balance between protecting trade secrets and sharing the critical information needed for reproducible research,” Strambio De Castillia said.
The Imaging-PHD project builds on community standards for microscopy metadata developed by international bioimaging and software development initiatives such as 4D Nucleome, BioImaging North America, QUAREP-LiMi and Open Microscopy Environment, and leverages research resource identifiers and CoreMarketplace, a searchable list of active core facilities, for the persistent identification of instrument models and core facilities.
“We want to make this technology more user-friendly and add functionality in the form of interactive platforms,” Strambio De Castillia said. “Our goal is to empower research scientists and corefacility staff to fully leverage this cyberinfrastructure, thereby enhancing the quality, value and efficiency of scientific research. To maximize impact, the project includes a robust outreach component that ensures our tools address realworld needs, are intuitive to use and remain accessible to everyone. By doing so, we will enable anyone who wishes to adopt these tools to do so without compromising their own research productivity.”
