Each month during 2018, graduate student Alyssa Preiser created an infographic-style post about an influential plant scientist. Even though communication is key in our work, we tend to not talk very well across subsets of our discipline. Each month I’ll be posting a short biography of a different member of the plant science community, sharing some of the highlights […]
This month’s plant scientist highlight is Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Goethe isn’t typically through of as a plant scientist, primarily being known for his literary works, but he greatly contributed to the systematic characterization of plants and the idea of homology. Johann grew up as the son of an innkeeper who had considerable wealth. His father used their […]
A series by Alyssa Preiser Why did you decide to pursue science as you went through college, and what got you particularly interested in epigenetics and plant developmental transitions? I loved the documentaries of the marine biologist Jacques Cousteau so I chose to study marine biology at university. There I discovered biochemistry, which I hadn’t really done […]
A series by Alyssa Preiser Why did you decide to pursue science as you went through college, and what got you particularly interested in plant defense and plant/organism interactions? I was always interested in science. It started as a young kid when I used to collect natural history – animal skulls, feathers, interesting pebbles, tree […]
This month we are featuring Andrew Benson, one of the most influential people in the discovery of the Calvin-Benson cycle. Andrew Benson came on the scene at the right time. Around the time he was born, Willstätter and Toll showed that chloroplasts absorbed CO2. After that, the hunt for the reaction of how plants fixed carbon was […]
Why did you decide to pursue science as you went through college, and what got you particularly interested in rice stress and plant domestication? There were two areas I had an aptitude for in college – science and journalism. I was lucky to get experience in both during my college days,. And while journalism was tempting (I was even […]
This month we are featuring Barbara McClintock. She was at the cutting edge of her field and many of her discoveries weren’t accepted until years later. She has contributory greatly to the fields of genetics, ethnobotany, and paleobotany. Dr. McClintock grew up as an independent and determined child. She graduated high school early and when her university did not […]
Sophien Kamoun is our plant scientist highlight of the month. He grew up in Tunisia and during the course of his studies, he has lived in Paris, the Netherlands, the United States, and now the United Kingdom. He is active on social media, pioneering ways to connect with other scientists and the public. Dr. Kamoun […]
Why did you originally decide to pursue science and what got you interested particularly in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi? I was always interested in science – biology and chemistry were my favorite subjects at school and I was fascinated by microbes and parasites. Also with microscopes and the possibility to see ‘the invisible’. As an undergraduate student, I […]