Researchers in the Gilroy lab can't help but want to share our fascination with science and plant biology with anyone who will listen... and so we are all active in outreach to schools, civic groups and the public in general. These activities range from talks and interviews on local TV and radio to visitng schools and societies to discuss plant and space science. We also collaborate with groups such as the Madison West High School Rocketry Club and Badger Balistics (their University undergraduate counterparts) to design and fly plant science payloads on their rockets (these students are AWESOME!). Additionally, we work closely with the outreach groups at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation to provide a regular presence at outreach events such as Saturday Science, DIY Science and Science Expeditions, where we have an immense amount of fun showing how plants work and what happens when you put them into space. Check out our Facebook page for the latest on where we are and what we will be doing. When we are actively running flight experiments to the Space Station, technical updates are posted to our spaceflight Blog.

We've been working with NASA GeneLab to make life science data accessible to citizen scientists. This work was made possible by collaborators at the NSF CyVerse Cloud Computing infrastructure, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and Qlik. The Astrobotany team's international presence has grown links a growing a community of Astrobotany educators in the US, Japan and the UK. Our goal is to use the excitement of space exploration to train the next generation of citizen scientist to tackle any challenges that may arise in the future.

Below is a data visualization that provides access to NASA's Meteorite data. In order to understand data it is important to be able to explore it and play with.