December 2018

• Starting in the spring, Julianne Matcynszyn will join the Everhart Lab to complete her Ph.D., which is on the ecological differnatiation within Mesocriconema xenoplax cryptic species. She comes to our lab after four years in Dr. Tom Powers’ lab. Julianne is targeting August for completion of her dissertation. Welcome, Julianne!
• This month, I finalized and submitted my application for early tenure consideraton in the Department of Plant Pathology. Since there is no third year review in our department and no penalty for going up a year early for tenure consideration, I considered this a “no brainer”. In the worst case scenario, this will allow me to gain feedback on what I need to do this year to make a winning application next year.

November 2018

• Invited by Dr. David Cook of the Department of Plant Pathology, I visited Kansas State University to give a seminar. This was a wonderful trip to a department with several new, vibrant faculty engaged in high-end research. It was a very special moment for me to be invited to give a seminar in the place where my dad, Dr. Eldon Everhart, earned his B.S. and M.S. in Horticulture working with Dr. Charlie Hall in the 1960’s.

October 2018

• A new undergraduate student in biochemistry, Olivia Renelt, has joined the Everhart Lab to help out with our fungicide sensitivity assays and molecular genetics projects. Welcome, Olivia!
• Invited by the graduate student association in the Department of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology, I traveled to Penn State University to give a departmental seminar, Intro to R Workshop, and chat with the students about time management. It was a whirlwind trip that was amazing!

August 2018

• Several of us took a trip to Boston for the combined meeting of the International Congress of Plant Pathology (ICPP) and the American Phytopathological Society, where one workshop, one talk, and several posters will be presented by members of our group.
• Workshop: Intro to R for Plant Pathologists was co-taught with Nikita to >60 attendees
• Talk: Nikita gave a presentation in a special session on fungicide resistance to a large audience

July 2018

• The 8-week summer semester teaching Success in the Sciences has finally come to an end and, after a week of recovery, Ashley, Kimberly, and I have decided that our work to develop this coures will be documented as a Benchmark Portfolio to be published on UNL Digital Commons, shared in Canvas to enable others to import the course, and we will analyze artifacts of our course in order to summarize the work for publication in a journal like North American College Teachers in Agriculture.

June 2018

• The Everhart Lab is headed to Fargo, ND this June to attend the APS North Central Division Meeting. Among abstracts submitted, Edgar’s was selected for one of only a very limited number of oral presentation slots. He will be presenting a talk entitled, “Fungicide sensitivity of 42 Sclerotinia sclerotiorum isolates in the North Central U.S. and determination of discriminatory concentrations.”
• Joining the Everhart Lab is Karen Ferreira Da Silva. Karen comes to us with research experience working in the labs of Drs. Gary Yuen and Josh Herr, and having received her M.S. in Entomology working with Dr. Blair Sigfreid. Projects that Karen will complete in my lab include a meta-analysis of gene expression data, a greenhouse study to evaluate interactions in the fall armyworm x Goss’s wild pathogen on disease development, and a survey of leadership training provided to and needed for students in Plant Pathology and the broader agricultural STEM careers. Welcome Karen!

May 2018

• We are welcoming two new people to our lab this summer! Callie Braley and Rachel Persson.
• Callie is a student in the Doctor of Plant Health program and will be spending time learning about how research on fungicide sensitivity is conducted in the lab. She will also begin a small survey of Nebraska to see if she finds any QoI-resistant isolates of the frogeye leaf spot pathogen Cercospora sojina.
• Rachel is an undergraduate student in biochemistry and received funding from the UNL UCARE program to conduct a small study where she will be comparing genotyping results from Dr. Jim Steadman’s lab Sclerotinia sclerotiorum database to genotyping results in our lab in order to determine if genotyping results of the two can be compared and combined.
• This summer I’ll be teaching a new course in professional development, entitled Success in the Sciences. The fun part is that this is a coures that I am co-developing wtih two graduate students in the Complex Biosystems program, Kimberley Stanke and Ashley Stengel, with additional guidance on curriculum development and active learning techniques from Dr. Sydney Brown.

April 2018

• Both sad and exciting news that both Zhian and Thomas will be moving on to new postdoctoral positions this month
• Zhian will be taking a new postdoctoral researh position in London with Dr. Theobart Jombart, the author of the adegenet R package. Although I am sad to see Zhian go, I am excited for him to gain this new experience!
• Thomas is moving north to Carrington, ND to gain tons of field experience working with Michael Wunsch. They will be working together to evaluate fungicide applications for the control of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum diseases in multiple row crops.

March 2018

• Wow! What a month! We submitted three manuscripts in two weeks to Tropical Plant Pathology for the special issue on Sclerotinia research. All of our submitted manuscripts are open and available for comment at PeerJ Preprints:
  • Pannullo, AP, ZN Kamvar, TJJ Miorini, JR Steadman, and SE Everhart. 2018. Genetic variation and structure of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum populations from soybean in Brazil. PeerJ Preprints
  • Miorini, TJJ, ZN Kamvar, R Higgins, CG Raetano, JR Steadman, and SE Everhart. 2018. Variation in pathogen aggression and cultivar performance against Sclerotinia sclerotiorum in soybean and dry bean from Brazil and the U.S. PeerJ Preprints
  • Kamvar, ZN, and SE Everhart. 2018. Something in the agar does not compute: On the discriminatory power of mycelial compatibility in Sclerotinia sclerotiorum. PeerJ Preprints

January 2018

• Becky Higgins of Jim Steadman’s lab and Zhian (pictured right) have their poster ready for the National Sclerotinia Initiative meeting this Wednesday, January 17th in Minneapolis, MN.
• The Everhart Lab has created a new Computing Cafe in our department that is open daily on Tuesday to Friday from 3:30 to 5:00pm in the Department of Plant Pathology Conference room located in 406B Plant Sciences Hall. Examples of computing tools that will be used in the cafe include:
  • Canvas
  • Drupal 7 and 8 (UNL web framework)
  • GitHub
  • R, RStudio, and various R packages
  • HCC-related command-line work
  • anything that exists on a computer
• Collaborative paper with Dr. Amauri Bogo of Santa Catarina State University in Brazil on two species of Neofabraea causing apple bull’s-eye rot is is now in press and available as a pre-print online! https://doi.org/10.1080/07060661.2017.1421588