Student Honors

PhD degree 

• Ethan Menke - Product placement scientist, Syngenta 
  • Advisor: Zenglu Li 
• Alexandra Ostezan - Corn breeder, Corteva 
  • Advisor: Zenglu Li
• Dung "Ivy" Tran - Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Brigham and Women's hospital/ Harvard Medical School 
  • Advisor: Zenglu Li 

Harshita Saxena trains at the International Rice Research Institute

Harshita Saxena, a second-year Ph.D. student from IPBGG, received a six-month training at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Philippines from June to December 2022, under the supervision of Dr. Jauhar Ali, Senior Scientist and Head of Hybrid Rice Breeding Consortium, IRRI. She worked on the rice blast pathogen, Magnaporthe oryzae, and was provided with basic molecular biology and fungal pathology training on the same.

She also screened a diverse set of hybrid rice parental lines for resistance against the rice blast disease and performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) to identify the genomic regions linked to the rice blast disease resistance trait.

This work will be a chapter of her Ph.D. thesis in the Bahri and Raymer Labs as she further aims to transfer some of the technologies and techniques on oat and turfgrasses for resistance against gray leaf spot disease, caused by the same fungal pathogen, M. oryzae.

IPBGG Scholarship awards

• The 2022 Glenn and Helen Burton Feeding the Hungry Scholarship Award recipient:
  • Mark Miller, PhD student from California whose research focuses on implementation of predictive, genetic technologies into breeding pipelines in the Li Lab.  He will soon start his job as Soybean Product Design Scientist with Bayer St. Louis. Learn more about Glenn Burton and his role in the Green Revolution and development of Bermudagrass.
• The 2022 Roger and Cindy Boerma Plant Breeding Excellence Scholarship Award recipients:
  • Qian Feng, PhD student from China working on the genetic characterization of flavor volatile and fruit weight in tomatoes in van der Knaap lab.
    
  • Sam McDonald, PhD student from Missouri working on identifying genetic resistance to the disease frogeye leaf spot and stacking traits to improve soybean seed composition.  He soon starts a job as Product Development Scientist with Bayer, in Marshall, Missouri.
    
• The Peggy Ozias-Akins Leadership in Science Scholarship Award (inaugural year) recipient:
  • Hallie Wright, PhD student from Indiana whose research focuses on finger millet blast, employing transcriptomics to identify putative host resistance and fungal avirulence genes in the Devos Lab, and who as participated in numerous leadership and outreach activities.