November 17, 2025
MizzouForward hire Tanu Malik is developing new tools that will enable the efficient and reliable reproduction of studies.
A Mizzou Engineering researcher is working to advance the pace of discovery with technology that will reinforce scientific integrity.
“As scientists, we need to do more to show our work,” said Tanu Malik, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “Not just in engineering and STEM fields, but in all areas of research.”
The ability to reproduce the results of research is a cornerstone of academic integrity. If one scientist can replicate the findings of another using their same methods, it helps ensure that the original study was accurate.
In the early 2010s, some in the scientific community became concerned over an uncomfortably large number of research results that could not be reproduced. This concern has become even more urgent with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).
“Computations are becoming more of a black box, and we don’t always understand how results are produced, especially as science becomes more interdisciplinary,” Malik said.
When research involves complex computations, scientists seeking to reproduce results investigate the data used and understand how the code was run. Typically, code and data are shared in containers: standardized units that can be run on any server, cloud or laptop. But it doesn’t end there.
“Just sharing code isn’t enough,” Malik said. “We need to be able to run it.”
That’s why Malik is working with researchers from the Stanford Research Institute, the University of Maryland, College Park and consulting company Bayesics to develop reproducible containers — containers specifically designed to ensure that computations can be reliably replicated, not just shared.
“Instead of spending days figuring out the context of a computation, researchers can quickly understand what was done, and that saves time,” Malik said.
Supported by a grant of more than $700,000 from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the team aims to address NASA’s data-intensive needs with their work.
Other researchers have developed reproducible containers in the past, but these required users to have considerable programming skills and other technical expertise. By contrast, Malik’s ready-to-use package automates the process, enabling any researcher to make their work reproducible.
In addition to the NASA-funded project, Malik is also working on a separate project to improve the reproducibility of the Jupyter Notebook — an open-source web application widely used for interactive computing and data analysis.
The project is supported by $3.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation which Mizzou will share with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Notre Dame.
“Right now, a Jupyter Notebook is not reproducible when scaled up to high-performance computing resources,” Malik said. “We’re using reproducible containers to fix this mess.”
Both projects have the potential to accelerate research across disciplines and ensure transparency and enable more interdisciplinary collaboration — Mizzou’s strong suit and one of the reasons Malik moved her lab to the university.
“I love working with scientists, and Mizzou offered the right platform to take my research to the next level,” she said. “This work will show the world the kind of impactful research we do at Mizzou Engineering.”
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