Ethan Li

I am a PhD student in Prof. Manu Prakash's lab in the Department of Bioengineering. I design and build hardware and software systems for global health and participatory science.

My thesis project is exploring the possibilities of robotic microscopy networks for global collaboration and learning. Specifically, I'm prototyping an online collaboration platform for the PlanktoScope project to build a global community where people will collect, watch, and discuss real-time measurements of plankton biodiversity in diverse environments across the world, generating and annotating ecological datasets in the process. My goal is to enable continuous microscopic monitoring of the spatiotemporal dynamics of ecologies at a global scale, as well as to offer people playful and social ways of exploring ecology and nature.