Celebrating our Summer Undergraduate Researchers

As always the summer has flown by and we find ourselves asking - where did the time go???  As we round out the end of our summer undergraduate researchers time in lab, we wanted to take some time to recognize them for their awesome achievements! This summer we had two incredible teams of summer undergraduates - the biology team and the engineering team. We are going to miss these awesome people so much!!!!  

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Biology Team!

Olivia Hazelwood

Olivia is a Plant Science undergraduate here at UD.  She has been with the lab since early 2020 and stuck with us through the pandemic. This summer she was awarded a College of Agriculture and Natural Resources Unique Strengths summer fellowship!  Her summer research looked at the expression of maize mechanosensitive ion channels (MSL) in aerial and subterranean brace roots. 

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Miranda Farnum

Miranda is a Plant Science undergraduate here at UD.  This summer she tackled the challenges of working on our maize and sorghum fields. She tirelessly labeled plants, bagged sorghum, weeded our fields, and took meticulous phenotyping notes for postdoc Ashley Hostetler's project!   

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Talia Collier

Talia is a Plant Science undergraduate here at UD.  In a deviation from our normal work, Talia brought her own project to the lab! Talia has been investigating the metabolite profiles of two different pomegranate cultivars. She received the McNair Summer Scholars award to support this work.  Special shoutout to Dr. Nox Makunga (Stellenbosch U) and Dr. John Chater (U Florida) who have made this summer project possible through providing protocols, pomegranates and helpful discussions!

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Engineering Team!

Joe Cristiano, Anthony Jiang, Parker Grobe

We had an awesome team of engineers contributing to our work this summer. From left to right:  Joe Cristiano is an undergraduate in Electrical and Computer Engineering here at UD; Anthony Jiang is an undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering here at UD;  Parker Grobe is a 4+1 who is about to start his MS degree in Mechanical Engineering here at UD.  I cannot say enough about how critical this team has been to our summer successes!  They tackled a slew of problems - from our version of ROS no longer being supported to designing and building new test frames and so much more.