First Simons Postdoctoral Fellows in Plant Biology Announced

The program provides funding for young researchers who are interested in a career in plant biology.

A photo of Arabidopsis thaliana, Thale Cress, showing its small white flowers in bloom. — photosteve/Alamy

To introduce fresh perspectives that could advance the field of plant biology, the Simons Foundation has named nine researchers as its first Simons Postdoctoral Fellows in Plant Biology. This fellowship provides financial support to researchers who intend to pursue a career in basic research on fundamental problems in plant biology. It places a particular emphasis on candidates with expertise in disciplines that could be brought to bear on plant biology, including but not limited to engineering, computational modeling, theory, chemistry, synthetic biology and physics.

This year’s fellows and their projects and affiliations are listed below:

Michael Burnett
Using fractal theory to improve functional models of vegetation
University of California, Davis, laboratory of Brian Bailey

Jie Chu
Mapping spatial landscapes of metabolites to reveal regulators of plant stem cell behavior
University of California, San Diego, laboratory of Alexandra Dickinson

Annalise Kane
Investigating the role of flavonols in drought and heat response using genetically encoded biosensors
University of California, Riverside, laboratories of Sean Cutler and Ian Wheeldon

Hongwoo Lee
Machine learning-guided sequence manipulation for tailored spatial gene regulation in plants
University of Georgia, laboratories of Ethan Pickering and Robert Schmitz

Michael Passalacqua
Revealing NLR guard-guardee relationships with perturbational single cell sequencing
New York University, laboratories of Shao-shan Carol Huang (NYU) and Ernest Fraenkel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Murillo Rodrigues
Enabling genome-wide genealogies in complex plant genomes
University of California, Davis, laboratory of Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra

Elissa Sorojsrisom
Molecular basis of chloroplast theft and maintenance in a photosynthetic animal
Harvard University, laboratory of Corey Allard

Elena Stiles
Uncovering ancient Amazonia: integrating paleobotanical and novel stable isotope proxies to reconstruct Pleistocene plant-climate interactions and forest resilience
California Institute of Technology, laboratory of Julia Tejada

Derek Wei
Computational design and testing of high-efficiency photosynthetic proteins in plants
North Carolina State University, laboratories of Colleen Doherty and Nathan Ennist