REEU Mentors and Research Areas

Here are examples of UGA Plant Center faculty who have served as mentors for the summer REEU internship and the research areas they cover. The available labs and projects for the current year will be determined each Spring.

Jill Anderson

  • Eco-evolutionary responses to global change
  • Effects of temperature and drought on plant functional traits, physiology, and fitness

Lab website: https://anderson.franklinresearch.uga.edu/

Robin Buell

  • Plant genome biology with a focus on crops and medicinal plants
  • Synthetic biology
  • Evolution of natural product biosynthesis

Lab website: https://buell-lab.github.io/

Dan Johnson

  • Tree physiological responses to heat and drought
  • Mechanisms of tree mortality due to stress
  • Tree water use

Lab website: http://danielmjohnson.weebly.com/

Brian Kvitko

  • Screening a collection of arabidopsis mutants for resistance to an herbicidal toxin produced by a bacterial plant pathogen.

Lab website: https://site.caes.uga.edu/kvitkolab/

Jim Leebens-Mack

  •  A collaborative project to work with others in the lab on gene capture and sequence analysis for species phylogeny estimation. Possible taxa include Asparagus (Asparagaceae), redbuds (Cercis, Fabaceae),   and North American pitcher plants (Sarracenia, Sarraceniaceae).
  • A collaborative project to assess plant genome annotations and characterize gene duplication and loss across land plants (see phytozome-next.jgi.doe.gov/ogg/).

Lab website: https://www.jlmlab.com/

Melissa Mitchum

  • Molecular plant-nematode interactions

Lab website: https://site.caes.uga.edu/mitchumlab/

Brad Nelms

  • Plant genomics
  • Pollen development
  • Reprogramming cell fate

Lab website: https://nelmslab.org/

Wayne Parrott

  • Biotechnology for biomass crop improvement

Lab website: https://parrottlab.uga.edu/parrottlab/

CJ Tsai

  • CRISPR genome editing and mutant characterization
  • Growth and defense tradeoff characterization at molecular, physiological and anatomical levels
  • Metabolite profiling of plant stress responses

Lab website: https://www.aspendb.org/

Esther van der Knaap

  • CRISPR editing of genes involved in fruit quality in tomato

Lab website: https://vanderknaaplab.uga.edu/

Scott Merkle

  • In vitro propagation and genetic engineering of American chestnut for resistance to chestnut blight
  • In vitro propagation of different ash tree species for conservation and restoration

Lab website: https://warnell.uga.edu/about/centers-labs/merkle-lab

Tanisha Williams

  • Climate change impacts
  • Collections-based research
  • Conservation genomics

Ian Wallace

  • Biochemical synthesis of plant cell wall polysaccharides and glycoproteins
  • Biochemical approaches to investigating glycosyltransferase function as well as associated plant genetic and cell biological approaches to investigate the function of these enzymes in plants

Lab website: https://iwallace36.wixsite.com/wallacelab

Jason Wallace

  • Crop bioinformatics
  • Crop genetics, with a focus on maize (corn) and other grasses
  • Beneficial crop-microbe interactions

Lab website: https://wallacelab.uga.edu/