Students
Hannah Brown
Research interests: Understanding how DNA methylation impacts gene duplication and how polyploidy leads to more robust crop species.
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.
Isaiah Kaufman
Research interests: Understanding and engineering photosynthetic processes and products for creating more sustainable systems.
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.
Angel McKay Whiteman
Research interests: Use of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology to develop novel pathways and products, particularly bioactive compounds beneficial to human health.
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.
Kevin D. Santiago Morales
Research interests: How rhizosphere bacteria can affect plant development during nutrient stress, specifically under phosphorus deficiency.
Kenia Segura Abá
Research interests: Use machine learning to predict condition-specific complex traits by integrating multi-omic and genetic interaction data.
Kaila Smith
Research interests: Improving photosynthetic fluxes by increasing our understanding of the crosstalk between photosynthesis and photorespiration.
Luke Strickland
Research interests: Exploring genetic and molecular explanations behind plant traits important for crop improvement, including biotic/abiotic stress tolerance, 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.
Alumni
Spring 2022
- Emily Jennings, Ph.D. in Plant Biology and Molecular Plant Sciences
- Pai Li, Ph.D. in Plant Biology and Molecular Plant Sciences
- Danielle Young, Ph.D. in Plant Biology and Molecular Plant Sciences