October 2020

• Congratulations to Nikita who has successfully passed her dissertation defense! After graduation she will be starting a postdoc position with Dr. Katie Gold at Cornell University to further expand her skills to spectral data analysis to detect fungicide resistance within vineyards. Exciting developments on both fronts!

August 2020

• The American Phytopathological Society’s annual meeting “Plant Health 2020” is virtual this month, with several lab members presenting their research. Here is a list of their presentations:
  • Fungicide resistance: Screening and risk-assessment of Rhizoctonia zeae populations in Nebraska Nikita Gambhir, Srikanth Kodati, Anthony Oyegoke Adesemoye and Sydney E. Everhart. Live presentation as part of 19th I.E. Melhus Symposium on Data Driven Plant Health: Friday, August 14, 2020, at 9:00am.
  • Rapid detection of QoI fungicide resistance in Cercospora sojina and characterization of populations in Nebraska Asha Mane, Tamra A. Jackson-Ziems, Carl A. Bradley, and Sydney E. Everhart. Technical session on Diagnostic Marker Development with live Q&A on: Thursday, August 13, 2020, 11:15am.
  • Fungicide Sensitivity of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum from Dry Bean and Soybean in the U.S Edgar Humberto Nieto-Lopez, Thomas J.J. Miorini, Martin Chilvers, Loren J. Giesler, Tamra A. Jackson-Ziems, Mehdi Kabbage, Daren S. Mueller, Damon L. Smith, Juan Manuel Tovar-Pedraza, Jaime F. Willbur and Sydney E. Everhart. Poster presentation.
  • An outbreak of bud blight disease of spruce (Picea spp.) in Alaska: an epidemiological study of Gemmamyces piceae Sergio Manuel Gabriel Peralta, Gerard C. Adams Jr., Loretta Winton, Karel Cerny and Sydney E. Everhart. Poster presentation.
  • Distribution and population structure of Rhizoctonia zeae in the North Central United States. Nikita Gambhir, Srikanth Kodati, Anthony Oyegoke Adesemoye, Olutoyosi O. Ajayi, Kaitlyn Bissonnette, Carl A. Bradley, Martin Chilvers, Ahmad M. Fakhoury, Tamra A. Jackson-Ziems, Leonor F. S. Leandro, Christopher R. Little1, Dean K. Malvick1, Febina M. Mathew1, Berlin D. Nelson Jr., Gretchen Sassenrath, Damon L. Smith, Darcy E. P. Telenko, Kiersten A. Wise and Sydney E. Everhart. Poster presentation.

July 2020

• Congratulations to Asha for the successful funding of the proposal she co-authored to the Nebraska Soybean Board entitled “Survey and rapid diagnostics for fungicide resistant Frogeye Leaf Spot in Nebraska.”
• Our new project proposal to the USDA National Sclerotinia Initiative was also awarded funding, which supports the project that Becky is working on to coordinate our multi-state bean line screening research and Edgar’s research on Sclerotinia sclerotiorum fungicide resistance and population structure.
• At the end of this month, we also bid farewell and good luck to Cristian as he leaves to begin his Ph.D. in California.

May 2020

• There were two graduations to celebrate this month, Cristian has graduated with his B.S. in biochemistry and Karen has received her doctorate in Agronomy & Horticulture. Congratulations to both of you! You both showed incredible resilliency to change by finishing your programs on time despite the uncertainty of the pandemic. While Karen has already left for her new position, we are fortunate to keep Cristian for another couple of months before he too departs for California, where he will be joining the Department of Molecular Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute.

April 2020

• Dr. Karen Ferreira DaSilva has successfully defended her dissertation this month! This is a major milestone and although the pandemic has limited our ability to celebrate in person, we are all super excited for her achievement and looking forward to celebrating this in person sometime in the future. Congratulations, Karen!
• Cristian has completed his UCARE research project and although we could not see him present the poster in person at the UNL Spring Research Fair, he was able to upload the poter onto UNL Digital Commons. His poster is titled, “Fungicides sensitivity of Sclerotinia sclerotiorum isolates from five states with different fungicide treatments.”

March 2020

• Great news! Karen has just accepted a job offer to work as a Plant Pathology Field Scientist for Corteva Agrisciences in Davis, CA. Now the dissertation just has to be finished and defended – no pressure!

February 2020

• Incredibly, more than 150 people registered to attend each day of our 2-day Intro to R Workshop that is being broadcast via APS as a webinar this month. This is the very first time that a computational workshop is going to be offered as an APS webinar. Hopefully this will encourage others to take a leap and offer their computing workshop as a webinar too.

January 2020

• Dr. Srikanth Kodati, former Ph.D. student in the lab accepted a new position as a postdoc researcher in the lab of Dr. James LaMondia in the Valley Laboratory in Windsor, CT. The ressearch that he will be conducting is on horticultural and specialty crops important on the east coast and build upon Sri’s M.S. research experience in Tennessee working on dogwood varieties with resistance to powdery mildews. Congratulations, Dr. Kodati!