Phil Conklin, Sam Leiboff, and Kelly Swarts have been awarded NSF-PGRP postdoctoral fellowships for research projects addressing a wide range of questions related to maize.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Phil, currently a post-doctoral associate, will continue his work in Mike Scanlon’s lab (Section of Plant Biology) investigating the very early stages of how shoot meristems of maize differentiate into leaves and flowers

Sam, a finishing graduate student in the Scanlon lab, is headed to Sarah Hake‘s lab at UC Berkeley to investigate the effect of drought on gene regulation in the flowering structures of sorghum and maize. His goal is to generate models of how different genes interact during drought and eventually provide a molecular foundation for breeding and growing practices to mitigate loss to drought.

Kelly, a finishing graduate student in the Buckler lab (Section of Plant Breeding and Genetics, USDA-ARS) will be doing post-doctoral research with Hernan Burbano and Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute in Tuebingen, Germany. She will be working with archaeological maize samples from Mexico, dating from 6,000 years to the present, with the goal of estimating population parameters, tracking selection patterns, and integrating cultural and environmental parameters to explain variance in the archaeological populations.