-Magdalen Lindeberg
Congratulations to SIPS graduate student Bryce Askey and incoming students Josh Felton, Sriram Parasurama, and Faith Twinimaani, recipients of NSF-GRFP awards for 2023. The National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program is the country’s oldest fellowship program that directly supports graduate students in various science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields and who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.
Bryce Askey is a graduate student in the Field of Plant Biology, working in Laura Gunn’s research program. He is characterizing the pyrenoid of Penium margaritaceum, an alga that is sister to all land plants. A better understanding of the P. margaritaceum pyrenoid will benefit efforts to engineer a pyrenoid into a crop plant, with the potential to boost growth, increase yields, and improve water use efficiency.
Sriram Parasurama, currently a student in the University of Washington School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, is an incoming graduate student in the Field of Horticulture. His proposal is focused on characterization of the beneficial impact of root-associated microbes on whole-plant physiology with the goal of building an agent-based model to predict emergent properties in plant-microbe systems.
Faith Twinamaani, currently a student in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at University of Florida is an incoming graduate student in the Field of Horticulture. Her undergraduate research at UF has explored leaf spectroscopy as a quick, non-destructive way to measure leaf pigment concentrations in blueberry.
Josh Felton is a recent graduate of Colorado College, working in their Department of Organismal Biology and Ecology. For his undergraduate honors thesis he compared the reproductive biology of two species of Bromeliaceae (the pineapple family), confirming that both species were self-compatible and identifying differences in reproductive allocation to fruits.