CEPCEB celebrated its 16th Annual Symposium and Awards Ceremony on November 30, 2018.

Christina Smolke, Professor of Bioengineering, and by courtesy, of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University, served as the Distinguished Noel T. Keen Lecturer. Christina’s research focuses on developing modular genetic platforms for programming information processing and control functions in living systems, and she presented the talk “Biosynthesis of Complex Plant-Derived Natural Product”.

This half-day event also included talks by CEPCEB’s faculty, including Hailing Jin (“Cross-Kingdom RNAi and small RNA trafficking between plant and fungal pathogens”); S. Hollis Woodward (“Bumble bee nutritional ecophysiology: considering floral rewards from the pollinator perspective”); Dan Koenig (“Plant genome evolution”); Wenbo Ma (“Citrus Huanglongbing: what can we learn from pathogen effectors”); and Ian Wheeldon (“Design and validation of a genome-wide CRISPR screen for the oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica”).

As always, a true highlight of the day was the award presentations to our junior researchers! Simran Sandhu of the Linda Walling and Peter Atkinson labs received the Neil Campbell Undergraduate Student Award For Outstanding Research. Kelly Clark of the Wenbo Ma lab received the CEPCEB Graduate Student Award for Outstanding Research, and Honghong Wu of Juan Pablo Giraldo’s lab received the CEPCEB Post Doc Award for Outstanding Research.

This year’s special event ended with a post-symposium reception.