MyAsia Owens, Paola Diaz-Matamoros, and Sara Field all presented posters at the UNC Charlotte 2025 Undergraduate Research Conference yesterday. Taylor Yonemura presented a talk about their project on bee dispersal of fungal spores (not pictured because the room was dark). Congrats to Sara on her Honorable Mention!
We are so excited to spotlight Dallas Moses as an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program Honorable Mention! UNC Charlotte had 5 honorable mentions and 1 award this year, and this prestigious recognition highlights our lab’s commitment to student training and Dallas’ hard work on her projects.
We are also grateful to the ROOT&SHOOT Research Coordination Network (support from NSF) for TWO mentor/mentee pair travel scholarships awarded to our lab. This summer, Bhuwan Abbot and Morgan Carter will be attending the International Society for Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions conference in Germany and Dallas Moses and Paola Diaz-Matamoros will be attending the American Society for Plant Biology’s meeting in Wisconsin. We absolutely could not make this happen without the support from NSF and this Research Coordination Network and we can’t wait to make the most of these opportunities! Connect with us there!
We’re in the midst of a busy spring semester and it is a little quiet now over spring break. I wanted to highlight a bit of what we have been up to. Grad student Dallas Moses gave a research talk to Envirothon students from local schools as part of a UNC Charlotte showcase. We also have had some productive lab meetings with a new format where each person brings one slide of data or experiment planning to get feedback on. A little glimpse into our computational lab! Ruth Wright and Aylha Pferschy passed their comprehensive exams for PhD and MSc programs, respectively, so big congrats to them for progressing in their degree programs. Finally, we have lots of abstract writing and paper writing going on, so we are excited to share more of our work with the community soon.
We are excited to share a new minireview by graduate student Dallas Moses that is out now in Phytobiomes. We’re hoping this minireview is helpful for those in plant health and microbiology who want to learn more about bacterial-fungal interactions, but don’t know where to start!
We’re also grateful to UNC Charlotte for new support through a Faculty Research Grant that will help fund Alison Moore’s graduate work on the type VI secretion system in endohyphal bacteria.
We celebrated the end of another semester with a Lab Thanksgiving potluck, jointly with the LaBella lab. Everyone is ready for winter break, but still came out to support MyAsia’s poster as part of her OUR internship. Her poster stood out at the session, not only for being pink, but for her excellent delivery!
Over the past month, we had three students attend the SACNAS NDiSTEM meeting in Phoenix, AZ, and five students present at our Annual Biological Sciences Symposium, plus Dr. Carter’s talk at the 8th Partnership in Biocontrol, Biostimulants & Microbiome Congress. We are grateful for the funding from SACNAS, UNC Charlotte, and Global Engage to make our attendance at these events happen. It’s delightful to see so many in the lab getting to share their progress in various venues. While these are the outputs seen by our colleagues, first committee meetings and qualifying exams are also underway this semester. Hoping to get some of these projects into preprints soon!
The temperatures are cooling, leaves started turning, and we are one month into the Fall Semester! It’s been buzzing around here – quite literally, as undergrad Taylor started a collaborative project with the UNC Charlotte Botanical Gardens on bee dispersal of fungi in the gardens. We welcomed MyAsia Owens as a new undergrad through the Office of Undergraduate Research! Lots of fun updates to come as folks attend the SACNAS NDiSTEM meeting and the Partnership in Biocontrol, Biostimulants & Microbiome Congress this semester. Not to mention the brand new Mycology club on campus.
Our summer Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) students, Sara and Taylor, presented their summer projects in poster format during the end of summer symposium. Overcoming challenging, fast-paced courses while doing part-time lab work was definitely a test this summer. We are proud of what they accomplished!
I was honored to be chosen for the Schroth Faces of the Future symposium at the American Phytopathological Society. I presented a 40 minute talk in a session with other early career, amazing plant-microbe biologists. It was so fun to brag about our team and the work we’ve accomplished in just a year and a half! Grateful to the organizers and to APS and CIPHER for the travel funding to attend. -Morgan
We are so proud of Lauren Carneal, the lab technician, who is leaving to pursue her Ph.D. at Penn State in plant pathology. But also really sad to see her go! Lauren was the epitome of a helpful lab technician who worked on at least a little of every project in the lab, kept the chore chart going, and fostered a wonderfully collaborative environment. But don’t worry, we’re keeping a bit of her art/data here to be part of the lab. Can’t wait to follow her future success!
