A research community thrives best when it acts with a consensus voice and agrees to commonly held priorities. An effort to achieve such consensus within the plant science community was first launched with the 2013 publication of the document Unleashing a Decade of Innovation in Plant Science: A Vision for ... Read More >

Congratulations to the inaugural class of the ASPB Conviron Scholars Program.  These 21 scholars were selected from a strongly competitive group of over 150 applicants.  Read more about each awardee. Special thanks to Conviron for making this program possible through their financial support. Mary Modupe Adewole, University of Ibadan, Osun State, ... Read More >

PlantingScience.org is seeking scientists (undergraduates through retired/emeritus) willing to mentor middle and high school students this fall (Sept – Nov). We expect over 1000 student teams and we don’t have enough mentors to work with them all! Mentors work online with 1-3 teams of students to help them design and ... Read More >

Elizabeth Henry, featured first author of Direct and Indirect Visualization of Bacterial Effector Delivery into Diverse Plant Cell Types During Infection Current Position: Postdoctoral Scholar, Discovery and Project Support in Crop Efficiency and Seed Growth, Biologics R&D at Bayer Crop Science. Education: PhD (2016) Plant Pathology, University of California at ... Read More >

Plant Biology 2017 welcomed students in Honolulu with an exclusive undergraduate poster session. Among those undergraduates represented, I had the pleasure of meeting many talented young researchers at the poster session, and was able to chat in depth with 14 of the ASPB Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF) awardees at ... Read More >

At Plant Biology 2017, the Biology Learning Objectives, Outreach Materials & Education (BLOOME) awards were the focus of the Education Booth.  These grants are awarded on a competitive basis to fund innovative ideas to increase education and outreach projects focusing on plant science literacy. Four previous award winners came to Hawaii ... Read More >

Can art be used to teach elementary students that plants respond to environmental cues? How can museums make learning about plant evolution more fun? Does writing and editing Wikipedia articles increase student engagement in science writing? How can teachers use schoolyard woodlands to teach students about diversity? Can citizen science ... Read More >

Big data, computation and bioinformatics have flooded the research community.  At Plant Biology 2017, it flooded the classroom as well. The education workshop, “ABC’s (Analysis, Bioinformatics and Computation) in the Classroom,” featured integration of computation and analysis of biological data into the classroom. Dr. Katerina Thompson, University of Maryland, and ... Read More >

How are genetically modified organisms (GMOs) made? Are they safe to eat? Follow along with Molly Edwards, the creator of Science In Real Life (IRL), as she heads to the Van Eck Lab at the Boyce Thompson Institute and demystifies GMOs by showing how they’re made in the lab and discussing their safety to ... Read More >

PlantingScience is an online mentoring program that virtually connects scientists with junior high or high school students as they participate in inquiry-based activities with plants. Mentors commit to an hour or so per week over roughly two to four weeks, during which they respond to student questions and help them ... Read More >

The ASPB Education Committee hosted an outreach booth at the International Conference on Arabidopsis Research (ICAR) held June 19-22 in St Louis, MO. Many ASPB members might recall that ICAR has, since the 2011 event in Madison, WI, “gone global” and the 2017 event marked the first time ICAR returned ... Read More >

Publications are important, but these days it takes more than a couple of nice papers to move your career to the next level. Also, increasingly scientists are looking outside the (academic) box for their next career move. ASPB provides many ways through which scientist can build their careers and diversify ... Read More >

Guotian Li, Rashmi Jain, and Mawsheng Chern, featured first authors of The Sequences of 1504 Mutants in the Model Rice Variety Kitaake Facilitate Rapid Functional Genomic Studies Guotian Li Current Position: Deputy Director of Grass Genetics/Project Scientist at the Joint BioEnergy Institute, a joint position between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ... Read More >

Last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved the fiscal year (FY) 2018 Energy and Water Development appropriations bill with a bipartisan vote of 30-1.  The Senate bill would provide $31.5 billion for the Department of Energy (DOE), an increase of $718 million, or 2.3 percent, above the FY 2017 enacted ... Read More >

Are you a graduate student or post-doctoral researcher interested in a chance to get involved and trained in K-12 outreach?  Would you like to mentor student research teams, without ever leaving your desk?  Do you have the time to commit to mentor 2-3 teams in BOTH the Fall and Spring PlantingScience Sessions? ... Read More >