Microbial ecosystems shape human health, yet remain largely invisible. This interactive dashboard uses citizen science data to make the human microbiome tangible, helping people better appreciate the ecosystems they carry every day, and how little we still know about them.
Project Links
This project sits at the intersection of science communication and data storytelling, and brought real joy to my longstanding curiosity about science. Visualizing data from a public outreach project where volunteers swabbed their belly buttons, I aimed to create visuals that invite curiosity rather than intimidation. It's an approach I now use with any complex or unfamiliar dataset. It celebrates citizen science and healthy microbes—and might just make you wash your belly button.
Project Overview
The human body hosts diverse microbial communities, and the Belly Button Biodiversity dataset reveals how much those communities can vary between individuals. This project turns data from an NC State University citizen-science initiative into an interactive dashboard that makes an otherwise invisible ecosystem tangible and approachable.
Built with Plotly, D3, and Bootstrap, the dashboard combines bar charts showing the most abundant operational taxonomic units (OTUs) for a selected participant, bubble charts exploring microbial distributions, and a gauge displaying reported washing frequency. Together, these visualizations let users investigate individual samples and explore variation across the dataset.
This was one of my first JavaScript projects and an early lesson in interactive data storytelling. Rather than asking users to interpret a table of unfamiliar microbial measurements, I built an interface that invites exploration through visual comparison and simple controls. The project demonstrates how thoughtful visualization can make specialized scientific data more accessible without requiring an audience to have a background in microbiology.
Gallery
Belly Button dashboard: Visualizing the surprising biodiversity
of beneficial microbes found in our daily lives.
Alternate dashboard view: Demographic details, bar and bubble
charts of microbial populations, and a gauge tracking washing
frequency.
References
Dataset from the Belly Button Biodiversity Project.