2015 Fellow of ASPB Award: Dr. Caren Chang and Dr. Keiko Torii

Dr. Caren Chang is well known for her pioneering work in ethylene signaling, and she has continued to contribute significantly in this area by elucidating signaling mechanisms and physical connections among the different players in the ethylene-signaling  pathway. By helping to fill major long-standing gaps in the pathway, Caren’s work has provided new advances in … Read more

2015 Excellence in Education Award Winner: Dr. Stanley Roux

The 2015 Excellence in Education Award acknowledges the outstanding contributions of Dr. Stanley Roux. During a career spanning more than thirty years, Stan has made a considerable impact at his institution by expanding the curriculum while developing and adopting innovative pedagogical methods. Both in the classroom and in his laboratory, Stan has emphasized meaningful hands … Read more

2015 Eric E. Conn Young Investigator Award Winner: Dr. Joe Louis

Dr. Joe Louis is recognized for his significant contributions to the field of plant insect interactions, as well as for his demonstrated excellence in outreach, public service, mentoring and teaching. Joe’s research work has shown that specific elicitors delivered by insects are recognized by plants to induce innate defense mechanisms. His research publications are in … Read more

2015 Corresponding Membership Nominees: Dr. Renate Scheibe and Dr. Kazuo Shinozaki

Corresponding Member status is conferred by election on the annual ASPB ballot. This honor, initially given in 1932, provides life membership and Society publications to distinguished plant biologists outside the United States. Renate Scheibe, University of Osnabrueck, Germany Renate Scheibe is a leading contributor to our understanding of redox regulation in plants, extending from metabolic … Read more

2015 Early Career Award WInner: Dr. Daniel Chitwood

The Early Career Award acknowledges outstanding research by a scientist generally not more than seven years post-Ph.D. This year’s Early Career Award recipient is Dr. Daniel Chitwood, who is recognized for his extraordinary contributions to the systems analysis of large, diverse and complex data sets that encompass morphological and 3 molecular traits. The methods that … Read more

2015 Dennis R. Hoagland Award Winner: Dr. Maria Harrison

Dr. Maria Harrison, Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Science, has pioneered studies of phosphate acquisition in arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbioses using the model legume Medicago truncatula. In particular, her findings that phosphate transport is linked to maintenance of symbiosis and that plants use classic hormone signaling pathways for regulation of the AM symbiosis have ushered … Read more

2015 Charles Reid Barnes Life Membership Award Winner: Dr. Wendy Boss

Wendy F. Boss, North Carolina State University, Raleigh This year’s Charles Reid Barnes Life Membership Award for lifelong service in plant biology goes to Wendy F. Boss. Wendy is recognized for her trailblazing three decades of work in the particularly challenging fields of phosphoinositide biochemistry and inositol phosphate signaling pathways; for her outstanding roles in … Read more

2015 Charles Albert Shull Award Winner: Dr. Cyril Zipfel

Cyril Zipfel, who heads The Sainsbury Laboratory, is the 2015 recipient of the Charles Albert Shull Award. Cyril played a leading role in the discovery of pattern-triggered immunity in plants, including the characterization of the bacterial peptides flagellin (flg22) and EF-Tu (elf18) as pattern-associated molecular markers that activate signaling by the receptor-like kinases FLS2 and … Read more

2015 ASPB Innovation Prize for Agricultural Technology Award Winners

The inaugural 2015 ASPB Innovation Prize for Agricultural Technology is awarded jointly to Sherri Brown, David Fischhoff, Mike Koziel, and Fred Perlak. Their leadership of pioneering research and development teams led to the engineering of commercially viable varieties of cotton and corn that express derivatives of insecticidal proteins from Bacillus thuringiensis. The insect-resistant crops that … Read more

20th Penn State Plant Biology Symposium: Plant Stress-Omics in a Changing Climate

Including workshops on metabolomics and CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing Human population growth and climate change present major challenges to sustainable food production. Plant biologists are developing and applying new integrative Big Data approaches to address these challenges. This symposium, “Plant Stress-Omics in a Changing Climate”, will bring together scientists who are working at various –omics levels … Read more

Next Generation Sequencing: Opportunities and Resources

As part of the iConnect team, I had the good fortune to go to several workshops during the conference Plant Biology 2014 organized by the American Society of Plant Biologists.   ASPB offers a diverse set of venues to acquire new skills and improve our careers by encouraging networking and initiation of collaborations. This year, … Read more

Thank You WORLD!

Looking back, we can all agree that it was a fantastic conference in Portland, full of exciting talks, eye-catching posters, motivated scientists, stimulating workshops, committee meetings, etc. So foremost, Thank You to the organizers, to all who came out to Portland, a special Thank You to the iConnect Team, and of course to the sponsors, … Read more

Plant Biology 2014 Special Minisymposium: Bioinformatic Resources for Plant Biology Research

I was eagerly waiting to write a post on this topic. This workshop attracted a lot of conference attendees, since current day plant biology research cannot move forward without these resources. Unfortunately it was kind of an effort to pack too many eggs in one basket within a limited time which could not meet expectations … Read more

PUI, RUI, phooey…

PUI=a category within academia, RUI=a category of NSF grants, phooey=what we say when realizing a session already started. The Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUI) Networking Event had a great turnout and fruitful discussion Saturday morning. This event is the opportunity for faculty from institutions that award no (or few) PhDs in the sciences to connect and share ideas for maintaining … Read more

#plantbiology14 Day Three

Today was a day for personal connections and actually getting an opportunity to see some science talks. The day began with the second in  series of sessions on the challenges of feeding 9 Billion people, with a focus on not just feeding, but nourishing them successfully. David Jenkins, Alan De Brauw, and Ricardo Uauy all … Read more

#plantbiology14 Day Two

Again, it’s late and I’m tired, so stream of conscious kind of writing that’s quick is happening tonight. I may even be more tired.  Today at the conference there were two major symposia, one on synthetic biology (making drugs from plant processes/engineering cheaper ways to make medicines) and the first in a series of 2: … Read more

Feeding the World

One cannot imagine anything more exciting than a food security session where science meets one of the greatest challenges in human history, feeding the world, now and in the future. Today’s session (Symposium III—21st Century Challenge: Feeding 9 Billion) commenced with a great introductory talk by UK Champion for Global Food Security, Professor Tim Benton. … Read more

Plant Biology 2014 Major Symposium I: Abiotic Stress Response

The first day of the ASPB meeting, 2014 included the major symposium on abiotic stress control in plants, presenting insights on the broad range of abiotic stress that impacts plants from extreme atmospheric conditions and availability of micronutrients; with discussions on recent experimental approaches in laboratory and fields to overcome those hurdles. Dr. Michael F. … Read more

Using social media to increase the visibility of your poster

Succinct messages have power.  Share your poster via Twitter, interact over your results, & your research impact will grow #PlantBiology14 See what we did there?  In just 140 characters (equivalent of one whole tweet) you learned a key theme, professional goal, and a practical action item (the hashtag) for connecting at Plant Biology 2014 and … Read more