April 11, 2025 at 1 pm eastern
The ASPB Early Career Plant Scientists (ECPS) Section wants to help you succeed in graduate school. As you prepare for the next step in your professional career, ECPS will help guide you with our annual panel discussion webinar, “What I Wish I Had Known When I Started Grad School.”
In this webinar, a panel of graduate students will share their experiences and give students a chance to get their questions asked. Panelists will go over topics including picking a lab, mental health, organizing work-life balance, lessons they’ve learned, and tips and advice on how to navigate graduate school successfully. This panel targets those thinking about graduate school, those about to start, and those already in it! Come prepared with questions for our panelists!
Sponsored by The Early Career Plant Scientists (ECPS) Section
Speakers:
Mae Mercado: PhD Candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Mae Mercado (she/her) is a PhD candidate from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research is on photosynthesis evolution in wild grasses and the role of rubisco activase in heat stress tolerance in maize. Her interest in photosynthesis started when she worked at the C4 Rice Center at the International Rice Research Institute, a project that has the ambitious goal of improving rice’s photosynthetic machinery to make it more efficient. Other than research, she is also passionate about communicating science beyond the walls of academia and advocating for Southeast Asian representation in the global science community. Beyond science, she likes brush pen calligraphy, film photography, karaoke, and playing the ukulele.
Seth Edwards: PhD Candidate at the University of Missouri-Columbia
Seth Edwards is a PhD Candidate at the University of Missouri–Columbia and is currently located at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, a not-for-profit research institute in St. Louis, Missouri. He received a BS in Biology from St. Louis University in 2019. Seth is currently a member of R. Keith Slotkin’s lab and is studying both early epigenetic silencing of transgenes as well as precision genome editing in plants. During his PhD, he had an internship at Bayer Crop Science and has been on several leadership committees at both the University of Missouri-Columbia and at the Danforth Center. Seth is currently serving as the Early Career Representative to the ASPB Council.
Joseph “Joey” Lagner: PhD Candidate at the University of Maryland-College Park
Joseph “Joey” Lagner is a 4th year PhD Candidate at University of Maryland-College Park. Most of his work up towards his degree has been collaborating with USDA-APHIS to establish CRISPR-based disease detection assays for plant pathogens, such as phytoplasma and viruses. For those that attended Plant Biology 2024, you may know him as the “People’s Choice Winner” of the 3MT competition. Joey has so far followed quite a non-linear career path. Joey started his college career as a Pre-Med student and Track/XC athlete at Sacred Heart University, but during his sophomore year he decided to transfer to University of Massachusetts-Amherst in his home state. Joey still was a Pre-Med student at this point but eventually sought alternative possible careers. In the second semester of his junior year, Joey took an entry-level plant science class and immediately realized that plants and all the cool science they do were his true passions all along. He devoted the rest of his time in Undergrad to learning as much about plants as he could. After graduating from UMass and during the COVID-19 crisis, he worked at a tree health care company taking care of clients’ trees on their properties in Connecticut and Long Island. When the world began to open up again, Joey still felt a longing to pursue more knowledge about plants. It was from there he contacted Dr. Yiping Qi inquiring for a spot in his lab and the rest is history. When not working in the lab, Joey enjoys watching movies, riding the DC metro system, and trying to name every tree he sees. He is very excited to share more of his experiences with you all and hopefully answer your questions.
Sannidhi Menon: PhD Student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Sannidhi Menon is a first year PhD student in the Brunkard Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She studies upstream regulators of TOR signaling using Arabidopsis thaliana as a model. She is also interested in teaching and outreach. Sannidhi currently serves as an Early Career Representative on ASPB’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion committee.
Moderator:
Taylor Scroggs – PhD Candidate at the University of Georgia Athens
Taylor Scroggs is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Georgia in Dr. Brad Nelms lab. Taylor is vice chair of the early career plant scientists’ section at ASPB. Her research uses a workflow to systematically explore transcription factor function with a focus understanding transcription factor induced reprogramming in maize. Beyond science, Taylor likes to run, garden, and sit in the sunshine.
