Nearly 40 high school students dropped iodine into test tubes during a special class recently at UC Davis. They wanted to see if certain genes affecting the starch in potatoes had been passed on to the plants being tested in the little tubes.
Ten UC Davis students and postdoctoral researchers recently attended the annual Vegetable and Flower Conference of the American Seed Trade Association. They enjoyed the opportunity to showcase their research during poster sessions, hear speakers and network with people in the industry. More than 800 seed professionals from 33 countries attended.
Among those attending from the Department of Plant Sciences were:
From Chilean tidepools to the High Sierra, 12 UC Davis graduate students traveled the world during the summer of 2022 in search of answers to ecology’s most pressing questions.
When UC Davis recruiters visit high schools and community colleges, they have new reasons to encourage students who might not usually think of college. The Department of Plant Sciences Multicultural Scholars Program now offers financial support to California students from under-represented communities to help them pursue a career in the field.
Students learned the value of self-reflection, bold thinking, perseverance and forming relationships in a recent workshop encouraging them to apply to graduate school.
"Science needs you!" was the most important message students heard. But how to get there?
A student-led effort in the Melotto Lab has earned a 2022 Lab Safety Award from UC Davis Safety Services office. “Their vigilance and commitment to safety have resulted in zero findings during lab inspections for two years running,” the safety office said.
Matthew E. Gilbert has been honored with a Program Advising and Mentoring Award by UC Davis Graduate Studies for 2022. Gilbert is an associate professor and vice chair of crops and ecosystems in the Department of Plant Sciences.
“Student well-being, both academically and mentally, is so important, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Gilbert. “For that reason, I became chair of the Graduate Student and Post-doctoral Welfare Committee, which is a sub-committee of Graduate Council.
Some undergraduate students may be willing to accept slightly lower grades in exchange for easier scheduling, researchers concluded during a study of undergraduate performance in one online course. Results of their study were recently published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment Nature.
This fall, three graduate students from the Department of Plant Sciences will start cultivating their confidence and growing the soft skills needed to bear their best fruit as professionals. Joseph “Zeke” Student, Madeleine Macconnell and Sire Kassama will work with professional leadership and business coaches, nourishing their ability to lead, collaborate and communicate, through the Launching Tomorrow’s Leaders program.
Team AggieCulture recently completed an incredible journey to compete in the finals of the Urban Greenhouse Challenge, held by Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
Trisha “Tris” Nicole Sabay Yasay was a cherished and beloved student in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences. Her untimely death in a collision on May 25 leaves a hole in our classrooms, at our Student Farm, in our homes and in our hearts.
“The community of students, staff and faculty of Department of Plant Sciences express their deep condolences to the family of Tris,” department Chair Gail Taylor said. “We are all devastated by the loss of her life. At our Plant Sciences Symposium today, we observed a minute of silence to hold Tris and her family in our thoughts.”
Alexander Saka, a senior biology student, has been honored by Prized Writing for his essay “Origin and Domestication of Soybean,” a paper he wrote for Distinguished Professor Paul Gepts’ Evolution of Crop Plants course in the Department of Plant Sciences. Prized Writing is an annual juried competition that highlights exemplary undergraduate writing from across the many disciplines at the University of California, Davis.
Two of the undergraduate courses in Plant Sciences at UC Davis (PLS 002 and PLS 110) prepare students for post-graduation jobs and careers. Four short videos show the hands-on opportunities that students get to explore introductory and upper level concepts related to plant science and plant production. Instructors include Jeff Mitchell, Gail Taylor, and Peter Freer-Smith.
Agroecology graduate student Jennifer Schmidt, Department of Plant Sciences, makes ceramics inspired by her Ph.D. dissertation work on the interactions between maize and its surrounding microbes. The visual aspects of her research lend themselves to hand-painted ceramics. Many scientists pursue some form of art or music, along with their science.
Philip Day, Steven Theg, and the late Kentaro Inoue, all UC Davis, determined how β-barrel proteins are sorted in plant chloroplast envelopes. Chloroplasts, which are responsible for photosynthesis in plants, evolved about a billion years ago from an ancient endosymbiotic relationship between a cyanobacteria species and a eukaryotic cell.