Richard Barker

Biography

Dr. Richard Barker: started his research career in the UK investigating the dwarfing alleles of the Green Revolution and developed a genetic engineering tool kit to tailor plant architecture at the world's oldest agricultural research institute "Rothamsted Research". Since becoming a UW-Madison botany genetics researcher investigating plant sensitivity to gravity and responses to spaceflight he has developed a range of custom imaging platforms and cloud-based data data visualization methods. During this time he has led a series of student inventor teams to develop novel hyperspectral scanning robots and co-founded the Collaborative Science Environment (CoSE). CoSE clinostats are now available for use by the NASA Ames radiation group, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) interplanetary protection team and the "Kennedy Space Center" (KSC) microgravity facility.

Spaceflight experience: Dr Barker is currently a Co-Investigator on multiple NASA spaceflight grants in the Gilroy Lab and has previous experience launching multiple experiments to the International Space Station (ISS). This practical experimental space flight experience has previously used the natural diversity of Brachypodium distachyon and Arabidopsis thaliana to identify space flight response genes during projects ‘BRIC19’ and ‘APEX6’. Data from these studies led to subsequent genetic engineering of important spaceflight response regulators leading to further flight missions ‘APEX5’ and ‘APEX8’. After demonstrating the potential use of genetic engineering in these model organisms his group was then awarded the CASIS TARGET Cotton Sustainability Challenge award which led to the successful launch of Gossypium hirsutum (Cotton) to investigate the effect of overexpression of a stress-resistant genetic enhancement as part of the project ‘TICTOC’. During this time Dr Barker was also an advisor on the ‘SPRECTRUM01’ and ‘BRIC-LED’ test flights. Currently, he is working on the project ‘TASTIE’ to investigate the effect of the addition of a beneficial microbial community on Solanum lycopersicum (Tomato) growth on the ISS.

Bioinformatics: He was elected chair of the NASA GeneLab Analysis Plant Working group and is coordinating an international collaboration summarizing recent discoveries generated by growing plants in space (Barker et al., under review). As part of the GeneLab project he built the TOAST (Test of Arabidopsis Space Transcriptome) database to link all the currently publicly available multi-omics data provided by the NASA space plant research community (Barker et al., 2020). He is committed to sharing research protocol and the latest NASA GeneLab astrobotany life science data through publications and the websites he manages. Dr Barker regularly presents at the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research (ASGSR) where he was awarded the "Laura Holston Young Investigator Award" for outstanding impact to the field. Recently he graduated from the American Family Institute social impact accelerator program and the NASA STAR training program. Although his research is focused on plant science he has also published on the effect of microgravity simulation on Human stem cell gene expression (Neelam et al., 2020) and the effect of cosmic radiation on mice transcriptomes (Barker et al., 2021). Dr Barker is a regular reviewer of articles for ASGSR jounrel, "Frontiers in Plant Science", "Cell press" and "Nature Communications".