About CoSE
Collaborative Science Environment Inc. is a Wisconsin benefit corporation based in Madison. We design, print, assemble and test every SciSpinner ourselves, publish the control software under the GPL, and ship each unit with the same documentation our engineers work from.
Team
Co-founder · Chief Engineer
Jerry designed the SciSpinner Max end to end: 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, holds a B.S. and an M.S. in Chemistry from UW–Madison, and is completing a Ph.D. on polymer 3D printing in the Boydston Lab.
Founding scientist
Richard is a plant biologist at UW–Madison who studies how plants respond to spaceflight. A co-investigator on NASA grants and on astrobotany experiments flown to the International Space Station, he advises on what a gravitational-biology lab needs from an instrument and works with customers on experiment design.
Founders
CoSE was founded by Jerry Miao, Richard Barker and Travis Tangen, who met at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery and took first place at a WARF Education Start-Up Weekend with a plan to put real research instruments in classrooms. The first product was FlashLapse, a time-lapse imaging system built for summer camps; the two-axis clinostat followed and became the SciSpinner Max.
Travis Tangen, a science educator who led the company’s classroom and outreach work, has since moved on. The benefit-corporation mission he helped write remains in the charter.
Contact
We collaborate with labs on custom sample fixtures, incubator installations and instrument variants, and with schools on classroom use.