About COSE

Research instruments built by scientists and engineers.

Collaborative Science Environment Inc. is a Wisconsin benefit corporation based in Madison. We design, assemble and test every SciSpinner in-house, publish our control software under the GPL, and ship each instrument with full technical documentation.

Founders

Co-founder · CEO

Dr. Richard Barker

Richard is an astrobotanist and senior scientist at Purdue University, where he studies how plants respond to microgravity and designs bioregenerative life-support systems for habitats beyond Earth. He is a member of the NASA Lunar LEAF team and holds a doctorate in plant genetics from the University of Sussex. His work also includes spaceflight omics, bioinformatics pipelines and open-source environmental sensor hardware.

He also works on open data, including the NASA Open Science Data Repository, and develops interactive educational simulations for space biology. At COSE he advises on instrument requirements for gravitational-biology research and works with customers on experiment design.

Co-founder · Chief Engineer

Jerry Miao

Jerry is a chemist and engineer who led the design of the SciSpinner Max: the printed structure, the circuit boards, the motion firmware and the web interface. He trained in the Gilroy Astrobotany Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and holds a B.S. and an M.S. in Chemistry from UW–Madison.

At COSE he looks after the engineering side: the workshop in Madison where instruments are built and tested, the open-source control software, and the custom fixtures and instrument variants developed with customer labs.

Co-founder · Former education and outreach lead

Travis Tangen

Travis taught high school science for fourteen years before moving into research as broader-impacts lead with WARF at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery. He holds an M.S. in Structural Molecular Biology from Birkbeck, University of London, and an M.S. in Science Education from UW–Madison, where he researches STEM partnerships. He now leads STEMsaic Research Impacts, which designs and evaluates research partnerships with universities and colleges.

At COSE he connected the lab with classrooms, helped bring collaborative instrument design into high school and college programs, and helped write the benefit-corporation mission. He remains a COSE supporter.

Co-founder · Former scientific adviser · Professor of Botany, UW–Madison

Dr. Simon Gilroy

Simon is a plant cell biologist and professor in the Department of Botany at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he runs the Gilroy Life Sciences Lab. The lab studies, at the cellular level, how plants sense and respond to their environment and how those signals shape development: signal transduction, lipid signalling, tip growth and tropisms. He works extensively with NASA on how plants grow on the International Space Station and on using plants for life support on planetary bases. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh.

Simon co-founded COSE and was its scientific adviser and one of its funders in the early years, before stepping away from the company. The SciSpinner grew out of his lab, where both Jerry and Richard trained, and his advice on what gravitational-biology experiments need from a clinostat shaped its design.

Founders

How COSE started

Travis Tangen, Richard Barker, Jerry Miao and Simon Gilroy in Madison — Travis Tangen, Richard Barker, Jerry Miao and Simon Gilroy, Madison

COSE grew out of the Gilroy astrobotany lab at UW–Madison. Jerry met Richard, then a postdoc in the lab, in 2016, and that summer Jerry and two teammates took first place at Startup Weekend Madison EDU with FlashLapse, a time-lapse imaging chamber for classrooms. Two-axis clinostat prototypes followed in 2017 and 2018, and Richard, Jerry, Travis and Simon founded the company as a Wisconsin benefit corporation in February 2019. The clinostat became the SciSpinner Max. The History posts tell the story in more detail.

Travis led the company’s classroom and outreach work and helped write the benefit-corporation mission that remains in the charter. He has since moved on to STEMsaic Research Impacts and remains a supporter.

Contact

Work with us

We work with research groups on custom sample fixtures, incubator installations and instrument variants, and with educators on classroom applications.

Email: [email protected]
Address: 56 Corry Street
Madison, Wisconsin 53704, USA