In our Who’s who in the Zoo blog series we introduce you to some of the people behind the Zooniverse.

In this edition, meet Dr Liz Dowthwaite, who is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, and long-term Zooniverse research collaborator

– Helen

Name: Liz Dowthwaite

Location: University of Nottingham, UK

Tell us about your role within the team 

I have been working with the Zooniverse off and on for about 3 years. I don’t have an official Zooniverse job title, I am a Senior Research Fellow in Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (https://www.tas.ac.uk) and Horizon Digital Economy Research (https://www.horizon.ac.uk/) at Nottingham, and am lucky enough to be able to spend some of that time working with the Zoo team. However, I have been called the ‘tame psychologist’! My work with the Zooniverse focuses on understanding how volunteer experiences can be enhanced to encourage continued participation and benefit the volunteer.

What did you do in your life before the Zooniverse?

Before working with the Zooniverse I was doing the same things I do now! I did BSc Psychology and an MA in The Body and Representation at the University of Reading, UK. I also worked in the academic library there for 7 years as a library assistant receiving all the shiny new books. I did my PhD in Digital and Creative Economy at Nottingham, in the Horizon CDT, studing online webcomic communities. I started as a Research Assistant in Horizon in 2016 whilst writing up my PhD, moving on to Research Fellow when I graduated in 2018, and recently won a promotion to Senior Research Fellow.

What does your typical working day involve?

I am a research psychologist based in a computer science department, so I study how people interact with technology. I mostly work from home in a tiny village in Oxfordshire, being frequently interrupted by two cats who would swear they have never been fed in their lives. I travel up to Nottingham about once a month to see my PhD students, and also to teach postgrads about digital footprints, responsible research and innovation (RRI) and experimental design. In my day-to-day I work across a range of multidisciplinary projects, for example online moderation and end-to-end encryption, trust in technology among people with mental health difficulties, benchmarks for measuring trust, and online wellbeing. This involves a lot of online meetings with my colleagues around the country, and lots of time spent reading things on the internet! Some of this is managing and planning the projects, some is conducting research – I write and analyse a lot of questionnaires!

How would you describe the Zooniverse in one sentence?

The Zooniverse is a force for good in the online world, allowing anyone anywhere to make a real difference.

Tell us about the first Zooniverse project you were involved with

I tend to study the Zooniverse as a whole but I last year I worked with some of the team at Science Scribbler: Placenta Profiles to help them to understand more about their volunteers.

Of all the discoveries made possible by the Zooniverse, which for you has been the most notable?

I found a Supernova! Does that count?!

What’s been your most memorable Zooniverse experience?

When we run surveys with volunteers we often get some really lovely stories about what the Zooniverse really means to people, and I think that’s really wonderful. Our projects have connected people to their own histories and cultures, and made impacts on their current lives, which is really heartwarming and I love reading them.

What are your top three citizen science projects? 

I don’t really have a favourite, I like to play with a range of projects. I tend to enjoy images and graphs the most. I was completely addicted to the original Muon Hunters, I saved all the images that looked like smiley faces, and it was really simple and quick and had a real ‘just one more’ vibe. I also love the University of Wyoming Raccoon Project because who doesn’t love trash pandas?

What advice would you give to a researcher considering creating a Zooniverse project?

Think about how you can support and engage with your volunteers beyond just asking them to take part in the project!

How can someone who’s never contributed to a citizen science project get started?

Just get clicking! There really is something to interest everyone on the Zooniverse – explore the project pages and dive in. Most of the projects have excellent tutorials to get you started. Remember that it’s ok to get things wrong, many people classifying the same things leads to an excellent consensus and high quality data. And if a project isn’t for you, there is bound to be another one out there that you’ll love.

When not at work, where are we most likely to find you?

On the internet! But also reading the London Review of Books, drinking wine, or walking in the beautiful countryside around Oxfordshire – sometimes all of those at once if we find an awesome country pub! I’m also a keen cook (but not baker) and an extremely keen eater, and a reluctant runner (partly due to all of the eating)…

You can hear more from Liz on Twitter or on her blog.

In our Who’s who in the Zoo blog series we introduce you to some of the people behind the Zooniverse. This week, meet Maysa, a developer in our Oxford team

– Helen

Name: Maysa Bashraheel

Location: Oxford University, but based in Manchester.

Tell us about your role within the team 

This is my third week! I am the Zooniverse Developer Intern.

What did you do in your life before the Zooniverse?

About 4 weeks ago I was still a science teacher at a secondary school in Manchester – I came to my role after spending the last couple of years dabbling in coding and building stuff. I only realised I could potentially make a career out of a hobby in January. In a past life I was a Research Scientist for the Manchester Collaborative Centre for Inflammation Research (MCCIR) and specialised in Immunology with a focus on Transplants and specifically the heart. My bachelors is in Biomedical Science and I have a postgraduate degree in Education.

What does your typical working day involve?

Currently, I am learning a lot, I spend a lot of time familiarising myself with the codebase that makes up the Zooniverse. I am attempting to solve some issues, asking a million questions and exploring.

How would you describe the Zooniverse in one sentence?

The Zooniverse is a nurturing organisation that is committed to radical transparency and connects people from all corners of the world.

Tell us about the first Zooniverse project you were involved with

I think it was Beluga Bits! But I really have been fascinated by the Dental Disease projects and some of the interesting work around Etch-A-Cell. I think I have a thing for drawing projects.

Of all the discoveries made possible by the Zooniverse, which for you has been the most notable?

The TESS Planet Hunters discovery planetary systems was cool. My personal favourite is the Galaxy Zoo discovery of Pea Galaxies (a class of compact extremely star-forming galaxies that look like green peas!)

What’s been your most memorable Zooniverse experience?

So far, the 2022 Zooniverse Team Meeting. Truly a wonderful and productive and just overall exciting experience.

What are your top three citizen science projects? 

The Big Sleep Survey, Parasite Safari, Stall Catchers.

What advice would you give to a researcher considering creating a Zooniverse project?

The volunteers are your biggest asset!

Where do you hope citizen science and the Zooniverse will be in 10 years time?

I’m hoping it will be a part of the Education system in a massive way. I would love if homework for students outlined contributing to a citizen science project and the curriculum actively involved scientists from a spectrum of backgrounds to inspire the future generation.

When not at work, where are we most likely to find you?

Hiking! My next hike will be up Snowdon in the dark so I can watch the sunrise.

Do you have any party tricks or hidden talents?

I can do some weird stuff with my tummy.

Just over three years ago we launched the first Etch A Cell project (https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/h-spiers/etch-a-cell). The project was the first of its kind on the Zooniverse: never before had we asked volunteers to help draw around the small structures inside of cells (also known as ‘manual segmentation of organelles’) visualised with very high-powered electron microscopes. We even had to develop a new tool type on the Zooniverse to do this – a drawing tool for annotating images.

In this first Etch A Cell project, the organelle we asked Zooniverse volunteers to help examine was the nuclear envelope (as you can see shown in green in the image below). The nuclear envelope is a large membrane found within cells. It surrounds the nucleus, which is the part of the cell that contains the genetic material. It’s an important structure to study as it’s known to be involved in a number of diseases, including cancer, and it’s often the first structure research teams inspect in a new data set.

The results…

Earlier this year, we published the first set of results from this project. I’ve summarised some of our most exciting findings below, but if you’d like to take a look at the original paper, you can access it here (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.28.223024v1.full).

1. Zooniverse volunteers dedicated a huge amount of effort! Zooniverse volunteers submitted more than 100,000 segmentations across the 4000 images analysed in this first Etch A Cell project. Through this effort, the nuclear envelopes of 18 cells were segmented (shown below in green) from our original data block (shown below).

2. Volunteers were very good at segmenting the nuclear envelope. As you can see in the gif and images below, most classifications submitted for each image were really good! Manual segmentation isn’t an easy task to do, even for experts, so we were really impressed!

3. There’s power in a crowd! The image below shows an overlay of every single segmentation for one of the nuclei studied in Etch A Cell. As you can see, through the collective effort of Zooniverse volunteers, something beautiful emerges – by overlaying everyone’s effort like this, you can see the shape of the nuclear envelope begin to appear!

To make sense of all of this data, we developed an analysis approach that took all of these lines and averaged them to form a ‘consensus segmentation’ for each nuclear envelope. This consensus segmentation, produced through the collective effort of volunteers, was incredibly similar to that produced by an expert microscopist. You can see this in the image below: on the left (in yellow) you can see the expert segmentation of the nuclear envelope of one cell compared to the volunteer segmentation (in green). The top image shows a single slice from the cell, the bottom image shows the 3D reconstruction of the whole nuclear envelope.

4. Volunteer segmentations can be used to train powerful new algorithms capable of segmenting the nuclear envelope. We found that volunteer data alone, with no expert data at all, could be used to train computer algorithms to perform the task of nuclear envelope segmentation to a very high standard. In the gif below you can see the computer predicted nuclear envelope segmentation for each of the cells in pink.

5. Our algorithm works surprisingly well on other data sets. We ran this new algorithm on other datasets that had been produced under slightly different experimental conditions. Because of these differences, we didn’t expect the algorithm to perform very well, however, as you can see in the images below, it did a very good job at identifying the location of the nuclear envelope. Because of this transferability, members of our research team have already begun using this algorithm to aid their new research projects.

The future…

We’re so excited to share these results with you, our volunteer community, and the research communities we collaborate with, and we’re looking forward to building on these findings in the future. The algorithms we’ve been able to produce from this effort are already being used by research teams at the Crick, and we’ve already launched multiple new projects asking for your help to look at other organelles – The Etchiverse is expanding!

You can access all our current Etch A Cell projects through the Etch A Cell Organisation page

In the this edition of our Who’s who in the Zoo series, meet Adam Taylor, Professor in Anatomy at Lancaster University, and lead of the ‘Where are my body organs?‘ project. 

– Helen

Project: ‘Where are my body organs?’

Researcher: Adam Taylor, Professor in Anatomy

Location: Lancaster University, England, UK

What are your main research interests?

Anatomy, Human Body, Public Engagement, Medical Education

Who else is in your project team? What are their roles?

Dr Quenton Wessels, Senior Lecturer in Anatomy. Professor Peter Diggle, Distinguished Professor of Statistics.

How do Zooniverse volunteers contribute to your research? 

We asked volunteers to add numerous structures to the outline of the body, so that we could analyse what they know and use this to inform how we educate medical professionals and design public health campaigns. We asked for some demographic information to help us understand if there are certain things that make individuals more or less knowledgeable about the body.

What have been the biggest challenges in setting up your project?

The biggest challenge setting up our project was making sure we were getting the best utilisation of volunteers time by asking them to perform tasks that were going to give us the most valuable data set to analyse. It would have been easy to ask vast numbers of things but being selective about the things that would be most useful to everyone involved going forwards. One of the most unexpected challenges was the initial response we got, originally planning for approximately 20,000 responses which we surpassed in the first few hours. This was a welcome unexpected challenge as it meant we had to think about how to much more data we could analyse and utilise in our project.

What discoveries, and other outputs, has your project led to so far?

At the launch of the project we received global media coverage which helped bolster our participant numbers. We are incredibly grateful for this. We had a number of local radio interviews. We have just begun analysing the data points and demographics, which has given us over 4.5 million data points to look at.

Once you’ve finished collecting data, what research questions do you hope to be able to answer?

We are hoping to answer what organs and structures the public know about. This should help us to educate medical and allied health professionals about organs that the public are less aware about, enabling clearer education about the health or pathology of that structure. We will be able to give indication of association of knowledge of structures with demographic information. We also hope to be able to inform public health campaigns around each of the structures in the study and design appropriate materials to help understanding.

What’s in store for your project in the future?

We hope to publish multiple papers and already have multiple ideas for follow-on projects.

What are your favourite other citizen research projects and why?

Anything relating to wildlife.

What guidance would you give to other researchers considering creating a citizen research project?

Get involved as a citizen scientist before creating, it is important to look at it from a participant perspective before designing.

And finally, when not at work, where are we most likely to find you?

With family, doing some form of contact sport or something aviation related.