Anna Olek: Plant Physiology First Author

Anna Olek, first author of “Essential amino acids in the Plant-Conserved and Class-Specific Regions of cellulose synthases”

Current Position:  Recently retired

Education: Anna Olek received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 1977 from Kraków University of Technology, Poland, and she received her M.S. in Mechanical Engineering a year later at the same institution.

Non-scientific Interests: Anna has recently retired, and she now enjoys traveling to visit her children and grandchildren, and solving crossword puzzles and Sudokus.

Brief Bio:  For over 35 years Anna worked as a researcher in Dr. Nick Carpita’s group in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Purdue University, including the position of ‘lab mother’ to numerous undergraduate and graduate student researchers. Over the years, she studied on various aspects of salt adaptation in cell culture, the composition and architecture of plant cell walls, the cloning and sequencing of cell-wall genes, identification of cell-wall mutants by infrared spectroscopy, and global expression analysis in maize stem development.