Konrad Hilse builds the digital tools that help materials researchers keep track of the physical side of science: samples, instruments, data and the connections among them.
At Penn State, that work began with LiST, or Lifetime Sample Tracking, which Hilse built from the ground up for the NSF-funded Two-Dimensional Crystal Consortium (2DCC). As lead developer, and for a significant period its sole developer, Hilse created a system that allows researchers to follow samples through their lifetime while keeping the associated research data organized and accessible.
What started as a tool for 2DCC has since found a much wider audience. LiST is now used by 3DFEM2 at Penn State and Q-NEXT at Argonne National Laboratory, and it will serve as an essential part of LATTICE, the recently awarded NSF PCL Test Bed for Layered and Thin-film Technologies with Intelligent Cloud Experimentation.
Hilse also developed DMR-FIRST, the Division of Materials Research Facilities and Instrumentation Research Search Tool. The system gives many MRI instruments their own digital object identifiers, or DOIs, and information pages, allowing researchers to cite the equipment used in their work and making it easier to see how those instruments contribute to published research.
Together, LiST and DMR-FIRST tackle a challenge that is becoming increasingly important as materials research grows more collaborative and data-intensive: making sure the information behind an experiment can be found, followed and connected to the people, samples and equipment that produced it.