Latest News

Graduate students Xiaotong Jiang and Bailey Kleven are the 2024 recipients of the Keegstra and Thomashow Travel Awards.

Max Harman, MPS graduate student, was awarded a 2024 Michigan Soybean Association Scholarship.

Lucas Reist, a graduate student in the Cell & Molecular Biology and Molecular Plant Science, or MPS, programs attended the 2023 Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minoritized Scientists, or ABRCMS, in Phoenix, Arizona.

MPS alum Leah Johnson is the 2023 recipient of the Kende Award, which acknowledges the best doctoral dissertation in plant sciences at Michigan State University over the last two years.

For a small field like computational biology, joining an international workshop is a once in a lifetime opportunity to learn from, collaborate with and talk to professionals and students from around the world. This is how MPS student Duncan Boren of the Vermaas Lab felt when he learned about the CompBioAsia program.

This fall, Molecular Plant Sciences graduate student Cathy Mercado alongside other MSU students attended the 50th National Diversity in STEM Conference in Portland, Oregon. The conference is hosted annually by SACNAS, or the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science.

Food security is an important area of study to Walker lab MPS graduate student Luke Gregory. That’s why when he found an internship for Bayer on LinkedIn, he knew it was the one for him. Bayer’s vision “Health for all, hunger for none,” interested Luke.

In plants, the jasmonate signaling pathway helps plants control their defense responses to environmental stresses. Like the human body, plants respond differently to individual threats. Just as people wouldn’t get a fever due to a sprained ankle, plants deal with harmful elements in particular ways. A study from the Howe lab looks at how plants respond to environmental threats in the correct way.