Morgan Carter

Summer flew by this year! We welcomed two OUR scholars, Mia Manjarres and Amritha Selvaraj, and a masters student Haeden Poslinski. We also worked with Johnson C. Smith University DataSmiths’ program on our collaboration with the Zoonotic and Vector-Borne Disease Lab.

The lab is especially excited about our new NSF CAREER award that supports the core of our scientific research! We will be welcoming cohorts of first-year researchers into the lab, offering educational programs on microbial friend and foes with the Botanical Gardens and working on bacterial secretion systems as part of this project.

The Carter Lab wrapped up the Spring 2026 semester with an ice cream run to celebrate. Megan Soto and Ty Sokolowski finished up their time in the lab and we wish them the best with graduation and moving on to exciting new adventures.

This summer is sure to be jam packed as we welcome two new students, Amritha and Mia through OUR internships. The lab is also grateful for summer stipend support from the Graduate school in the form of fellowships for Bhuwan and Dallas.

Also worth noting that the Carter Lab is making the most of opportunities at UNC Charlotte! Sara recently became a graduate intern at the Office of Research Protections and Integrity and Bhuwan will be a Fellow with the Graduate & Postdoctoral Writing Center this fall!

We are excited to receive North Carolina Biotechnology Center funding through a Flash Grant to work on Fusarium wilt in watermelon as a proof of concept for biocontrol of fungal pathogens using endohyphal bacteria. This project is built on preliminary work done by Dallas Moses and we hope to have the first story preprinted in the coming months.

Alison Moore graduated with her M.Sc. degree from the lab and got her own lab artwork. We will miss her contagious curiosity and constant puns. Alison was the first student to join the Carter lab when it started, so seeing her finish up is bittersweet!

Sara Field graduated with her bachelors, and is staying on as a masters student continuing her bioinformatics project looking at bacterial genomic DNA within fungal DNA sequencing.

I am behind in posting because we have had so much going on this summer but here is the snapshot so far:

1. Atalia Cooper and Eric Brooks joined the lab as OUR scholars for the summer, with Sara also being supported by OUR.
2. Bhuwan Abbot and Ruth Wright presented at Evolution in Athens, Georgia.
3. Dallas Moses did outreach at the local library showing off her watermelon plants and then went to the Applied and Environmental Microbiology Gordon Research Conference.
4. Morgan went to the Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions Congress in Cologne, Germany.
5. We posted a new preprint!