Students
Hannah Brown
Research interests: Understanding how DNA methylation impacts gene duplication and how polyploidy leads to more robust crop species.
Shannon Donnelly
Biochemistry & Molecular Biologyhome icon
donnellys16@students.ecu.eduenvelope icon
Lab: Doing rotations
donnellys16@students.ecu.eduenvelope icon
Lab: Doing rotations
Research interests: Key redox reactions involved in membrane lipid metabolism.
Philip Engelgau
Research interests: Genomic and molecular factors which are responsible for desirable sensory traits in fruit such as taste, color and aroma.
Lina Gomez
Research interests: New genes involved in biosynthesis and regulation of phenolic compounds in maize and Arabidopsis.
Huijia Gong
Research interests: Plant defense responses and specialized metabolisms related to the jasmonate pathway.
Luke Gregory
Research interests: To challenge and expand current photosynthetic models to better represent the photorespiratory response to increased temperature.
Max Harman
Research interests: Eliminating bottlenecks in plant genetic engineering and synthetic biology.
MacKenzie Jacobs
Research interests: Blueberry fruit metabolite variation and strawberry subgenome expression dominance and pangenomics.
Xiaotong Jiang
Research interests: The role of photosynthesis and photorespiration under stress conditions.
Leah Johnson
Research interests: Understanding how plant defense responses and metabolism are shifted after stress, through studying the jasmonate signaling pathway.
Kenia Segura Abá
Research interests: Use machine learning to predict condition-specific complex traits by integrating multi-omic and genetic interaction data.
Bailey Kleven
Research interests: Elucidating regulatory mechanisms of plant metabolic pathways during environmental stimuli.
Amanda Koenig
Research interests: Systemic lipid signaling and plant development in response to abiotic stress.
George Kusi-Appiah
Research interests: CO2-concentrating mechanism of microalgae, photoprotection in photosynthesis, oxidative stress in photosynthesis.
Emily Lanier
Research interests: Using synthetic biology to harness production of plant metabolites as high value chemicals for industry and medicine.
Moss Le
Research interests: Fungal biology, microbe-microbe interactions, host-pathogen interactions.
Serena Lotreck
Research interests: Using machine learning interpretability on model systems to study genetic interactions; information extraction and knowledge graph construction from plant biology literature.
Nick Moreno
Research interests: The role of plant metabolic chemistry in evolution and environmental interactions.
Lucas Reist
Research interests: Leveraging synthetic biology and plant specialized metabolism for sustainable production of complex chemicals.
Kaila Smith
Research interests: Improving photosynthetic fluxes by increasing our understanding of the crosstalk between photosynthesis and photorespiration.
Luke Strickland
Research interests: Exploring the genetic and molecular/metabolic explanations behind plants traits important for furthering our understanding of plant biology, as well as for crop improvement, including tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses, nutritional quality and yield.
Febri Susanto
Research interests: Understanding the biogenesis of chloroplastic lipid droplets in Cyanobacteria and plant's plastoglobules for enhancement of crop stress resilience.
Joshua Temple
Research interests: Improving productivity and stress tolerance in algae and unraveling their underlying mechanisms.
Ethan Thibault
Research interests: Investigating and characterizing key players in stress response pathways in plants.
Samantha Thompson
Research interests: Fungicide resistance of grape powdery mildew and powdery mildew genomics.
Danielle Young
Research interests: Isotopic labeling and physiological measurements to trace the fluxes of lipids in a model microalga under various growth conditions.