Dr. Debbie Kelly’s Comparative Cognition lab has a large number of animal species, which they use to study aspects of psychology and cognition. Some of Dr. Kelly’s specific research interests are the navigation, and the effects of aging and experience on learning and memory. When Dr. Kelly wants to start a new experiment, in order to have proper experimental controls, she needs to select animals to participate in the experiment that have certain medical and experimental histories. Given that Dr. Kelly’s lab has a large number of animals, spanning multiple bird species, it can be difficult to keep track of each individual animal’s age, medical history, and experimental history. That is why she currently needs a better system for organizing, filtering, searching, and selecting individual animals based on a wide variety of their individual characteristics. Our application will be a fully searchable database which inventories all of the animals in Dr. Kelly’s laboratory, to greatly assist with the development of new experiments and general animal care.

Currently, the system in place in Dr. Kelly’s lab to inventory animals is a series of different excel files. For each of the five avian species in Dr. Kelly’s lab, there is one excel file for all of that species’ experimental histories, a second excel file for all of that species’ medical histories, and a third and fourth excel files mirror the previous two files cataloging those details for individual animals which are no longer in the lab. This makes it very difficult and time-consuming to search through each excel sheet, tab-by-tab, to try to find eligible animals. Furthermore, these files are shared across a DropBox, and there have been numerous problems with improper updates and conflicted copies appearing on DropBox, leading Dr. Kelly to not know which file is the most appropriate to use when trying to select animals for a new experiment.

Our application would massively simplify the animal inventory system, and allow for the quick searching and cataloging of individual animals based on a variety of health and experiential factors. It would allow for the updating of animal information as a way to improve its usefulness going forward.