UT Plant Biology Graduate Program

Attention finishing PB PhD students: the Smith Fellows 2019 call for postdoctoral proposals was just announced. These two year postdoctoral fellowships provide support for outstanding early-career scientists who want to better link conservation science and theory with policy and management, improving and expanding their research skills while directing their efforts towards conservation problems of pressing US concern. For detailed proposal guidelines, please visit http://www.conbio.org/mini-sites/smith-fellows/apply/proposal-guidelines.

The Farrior Lab at UT is hiring a postdoc in plant ecology. For details visit the lab website.

New postdoctoral opportunity - deadline May 25th, 2018 Postdoctoral opportunity in plant ecology at UT Austin Our ability to predict future ecosystem functioning and to accurately manage ecosystems is limited by our understanding of plant ecology. In particular, we struggle to connect the scales of individual plants to landscape dynamics and global patt...

Plant Biology graduate student Sarah Cusser will defend her dissertation on Apr 30 at 10am in PAT 142. Come learn about her work on pollinators in agricultural landscapes (cotton!). More about Sarah's research can be found at https://sarahcusser.wordpress.com/

The annual vegetation survey in support of land management research at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center is a great way to learn your central Texas plants! (And contribute to an 18-year experiment!)

Whitney Behr is a 1st year PhD student working in Dr. Norma Fowler's lab and collaborating with Dr. Shalene Jha's lab to study the effects of prescribed fire on plant communities and their associated pollinators. Whitney spent this past winter measuring and observing prescribed fires across Texas and Oklahoma. Over the next two summers she'll return to these sites to measure effects on the plant and pollinator communities resulting from burning.

UT Plant Biologist Dr. Norma Fowler and colleagues address how the proposed border wall can negatively affect adjacent ecosystems (open access article).

Border wall: bad for biodiversity - Fowler - 2018 - Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment - Wiley Online Library Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment Volume 16, Issue 3 Write Back Free Access Border wall: bad for biodiversity Norma Fowler E-mail address:[email protected] Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TXSearch for more papers by this author Tim Keitt Depar...

New to plants? Poorter et al. provide an excellent guide for growing plants for experimental purposes. This is an open-access paper, worth reading before your first (or next!) experiment. http://www.publish.csiro.au/fp/Fulltext/FP12028

CSIRO PUBLISHING | Functional Plant Biology

Vinh Pham is a 4th year graduate student in Dr. Enamul Huq’s Lab where she studies how plants sense, interpret and respond to environmental light conditions. Using a combination of biochemical, genetic, molecular and functional genomic approaches Vinh works to understand key negative regulators in light signal transduction pathway in Arabidopsis. Additionally, she employs computational methods to analyze transcriptomic changes in order to understand the light-triggered gene expression network.

Taslima Haque is a 2nd year PhD student working in the lab of Dr. Juenger, where she studies the interplay between epigenetic modification and phenotypic plasticity and the effects these have on local adaptation. Here she is analyzing TagSeq expression data from from the shoots of two ecotypes of the grass species Panicum hallii, which she is using as a model system to understand adaptation to saline conditions.

On Mar 8, Dr. Colin Averill will speak about "Symbiosis between trees and fungi: how mycorrhizae connect our forests" in the UT Science Under the Stars evening seminars at Brackenridge Field Lab. Food and displays at 6:30, talk starts at 7pm.

March 8, Colin Averill

Great story about the impact of the Turner Plant Resources Center in teaching plant classes at UT.

The Value of the Billie L. Turner Plant Resources Center (PRC) for Teaching Plant Systematics Every fall semester the PRC...