B.S. in Horticulture from Iowa State University, 2015
M.S. in Biological Science from the University of Minnesota, 2022
I joined the Steffenson lab at the beginning of 2023 and have worked on several diseases of barley and wheat in the field and greenhouse. One disease that I have focused on is fusarium head blight (FHB) of barley, caused by Fusarium graminearum. FHB will be a focal point of my thesis work where I will be investigating resistance alleles coming from an introgression line population generated from a cross between the German malting cultivar, Scarlett, and a wild barley from Israel (ISR42-8). I also plan to carry out yield loss assessments caused by FHB by observing the disease's impact on single spikes in the field without the use of pesticides as a control treatment. We believe this will allow for more natural observations of losses caused by FHB. Another area of interest is the Barley Pangenome created by IPK in Germany. We hope to leverage the genomic power of the pangenome with disease screenings to find novel disease resistance loci.
Hobbies: Running, watching baseball, music
