[Julia Baulies]

Hi, Jiawen and all other readers! My name is Julia and I’m a PhD candidate at the National University of Rosario, Argentina.

I haven’t participated in outreach activities with my current area of research, which is plant regeneration, but I have in past instances of my work. Back when I was an undergraduate student in the University of Buenos Aires, I collaborated in a Plant Physiology lab and a Plant Morphology lab, and for a couple of years we had stands in the annual “Biology Week” the University organized. Some of them including fresh plant materials to show the visitors (from all ages, but mostly middle schoolers and high schoolers) the different modifications and adaptations of plants, and had games (trivias, connecting modifications to environments, etc.) for them to understand what they saw. Another time we set up a hydroponics system to show we studied saline stress, controlling the concentration of salt in the water and how it affected plant growth.

I also participated in stands from other labs, such as one from the Molecular Biology Department, in which we extracted banana DNA with common ingredients, but that is another subject.

Since I came to Rosario to pursue my PhD, I have participated in outreach activities, but not showing my particular area of research. Now I don’t work at the University campus but in a separate Research Institute, and (back when we were able, before the pandemic) we opened the doors of the Institute to welcome visitors, including children, and guided them through the labs and facilities, where they attended short talks about each lab’s work (not all labs work with plants), and at the end they could participate in simple experiments to see how the work we do overlaps with everyday activities or phenomena.

I hope soon we will be allowed to repeat those activities. Stay safe everyone!

[Julia Baulies]

Hi! I’m Julia from Argentina. I have a degree in Biology (oriented to Botany) from the University of Buenos Aires, and am now close to getting my PhD from the National University of Rosario. I currently work in root regeneration, aiming to understand its genetic regulation, but I’m also interested in other areas such as plant diversity, anatomy and morphology.