May the alleles be ever in your favor

I could already sense the festivity in the air when I arrived at the Maker’s Faire in downtown Shreveport early on a Saturday morning. I scanned the rows of vendors and food trucks as I looked for my target – the booth for Sciport: Louisiana’s Discovery Center. With help from the center and my mentor, … Read more

ASPB 2016 Election Results

Many thanks to those members who took the time to vote this spring; and hearty congratulations to our newly elected Council members, Harry Klee (incoming president elect) and Andrew Bent (incoming secretary elect)! Harry and Andrew will begin their next cycles of service to ASPB on October 1, 2016. Thanks, too, to Erich Grotewold and … Read more

Recognizing featured Plant Cell first authors, April 2016

Recently, we’ve been profiling first authors of Plant Cell papers that are selected for In Brief summaries. Here are the first-author profiles from the April issue of The Plant Cell. Kimberley Tilbrook, featured first author of UV-B perception and acclimation in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii Current Position: OCE Postdoctoral Fellow at CSIRO Agriculture, Black Mountain, ACT, Australia. … Read more

I’m Plant Scientist Jenny Mortimer, And this is how I work.

Location: Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Current job/title: Director of Plant Systems Biology One word that describes how you work: enthusiastically. I’m conscious of the fact that I’m lucky that I get to do something I’m passionate about. Favorite thing you do at work: Learn Favorite plant: Arabidopsis (boring I know, but … Read more

I’m Plant Scientist Dan Peppe, and this is how I work.

Location: Baylor University Current job/title: Associate Professor, Department of Geosciences One word that describes how you work: excited Favorite thing you do at work: collect and study fossil leaves Favorite plant: Cycads (Cycads have existed for about 300 million years, fossil cycads are really cool and were ubiquitous in the Mesozoic (~225 – 66 million years ago), and modern cycads … Read more

I’m Plant Scientist Dr. Stacy DeBlasio, & this is how I work

Location: USDA-ARS, Ithaca Current job/title: Postdoctoral fellow One word that describes how you work: Hard Favorite thing you do at work: Western Blot Analysis Favorite plant: Hairy nightshade One interesting project you have been working on: Here in the Cilia lab we use a mass spec compatible cross-linker to fine-map the binding interfaces between plant viral proteins and the proteins … Read more

Recognizing featured Plant Cell first authors, March 2016

Recently, we’ve been profiling first authors of Plant Cell papers that are selected for In Brief summaries. Here are the first-author profiles from the March issue of The Plant Cell. Christine Andeme Ondzighi-Assoume, featured first author of Environmental nitrate stimulates root tip abscisic acid accumulation via release from inactive stores Current Position: Research Scientist, Plant … Read more

I’m Plant Scientist Elizabeth Haswell and this is how I work

Bio: I am an Associate Professor of Biology at Washington University in Saint Louis. I grew up in eastern Washington State, did a BS in Biochemistry at University of Washington with Luca Comai and Ted Young. I receive a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of California San Francisco, working on yeast chromatin remodeling in … Read more

Living Letters: A Reflection on Communicating Across Differences

Research often involves hundreds of hours of behind the scenes work before results come together, ultimately culminating in presenting a snapshot of the project as a whole. This past year has offered me a glimpse into this process through my participation in ASPB’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program. Over the summer of 2015 I … Read more

I’m Plant Scientist Andrew Willoughby, and this is how I work

Location: University of Oklahoma Current job/title: Undergraduate Academic Assistant One word that describes how you work: Sophomoric Favorite thing you do at work: Floral Dip Transformations Favorite plant: Colocasia esculenta (ed.– Wikipedia page on this plant). One interesting project you have been working on: It’s completely tangential to my lab’s main focus but right now … Read more

PlantingScience Fellows Needed for Digging Deeper (with NSF)

ASPB and the Botanical Society of America (BSA) are recruiting 20 PlantingScience Fellows to participate in the Digging Deeper Project. Application Deadline – March 15, 2016 Apply Here Digging Deeper: Developing a Model for Collaborative Teacher/Scientist Professional Development The Digging Deeper project will develop, implement, and test a professional development (PD) model whereby teachers and … Read more

PlantingScience – springing into a new term of research in the classroom

ASPB partners with PlantingScience to support authentic plant science research in middle and high school classrooms across the United States and Canada. The spring session kicked off Monday, February 15. Already, almost 120 student teams from 11 schools are online and introducing themselves to their scientist mentors. Many other schools will be coming online soon. … Read more

Ugrad Contest: Share Your Story on Urban Sustainability

Three grand prize winners will take home $500 and an all expenses paid trip to New York City — the most populated city in the U.S. — to visit the U.N. headquarters in November 2016 and share their story of urban sustainability with world leaders. Sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Planet Forward Storyfest 2016 is looking for stories about … Read more

What Plantae can do for you and what you can do for Plantae

The American Society of Plant Biologists (@ASPB) and Global Plant Council (@GlobalPlantGPC) have recently launched  Plantae. It is designed to be the central hub of plant science…your plant science. Plantae may seem like just another social network, but it is designed to be a much more complex community. I’ve noticed some fatigue lately with Twitter … Read more

Plant Biology 2016: Publishing workshops

Attending Plant Biology 2016? The conference starts in six months, but if you want your work to be considered for a minisymposium or lightning talk, you need to submit your abstract now (or by 25 Jan, EST). You can read more about the conference, including major symposia topics and speakers, and the countless networking opportunities … Read more

Welcome to the NEW Plantae.org, the online home for plant scientists

In collaboration with the Global Plant Council, ASPB recently launched Plantae.org (in beta), the new digital ecosystem for plant scientists. Currently there are more than 30,000 plant scientists listed in Plantae.org, including all current and many past ASPB members, The Plantae network allows you to search for plant scientists around the world. The community is also … Read more

President’s Letter: Service and Recognition in Our Society

On the front page of the November/December issue of the ASPB News, alongside my first President’s Letter, was an exhortation to “On your mark, get set…nominate!” ASPB currently has about 4,000 members and is hoping to greatly increase this number thorough its new Plantae portal. It is really important that members feel they are part … Read more

Name calling in science is serious sustainability stuff

Is a botanist by any other name more poised to save the world? The names of scientific disciplines aren’t your forebears’ academia, and those changes signal necessary shifts in how research is done. Recently, environmental scientist Malcolm McCallum publicly mused on an online ecology discussion site about academia’s shift from old-school names for fields of … Read more