On Sept 30, 2019, Nhung Hoang defended her dissertation titled “The role of microRNAs in the legume – rhizobium nitrogen fixing symbiosis” to earn her doctoral degree! Congrats, Nhung!
Thanks Dr. Gary Stacey for your motivation, encouragement and support.
And thanks for never leaving my side through the tough and ugly times, glad to have very nice time with you, my labmates.
Beverly Agtuca, an ASPB member since 2017 (from ASPB news July/August 2019)
In volume 46, number 4 of ASPB news (full version), Berverly shared her experience as an ASPB member. Being encouraged by Dr. Gary Stacey, Beverly joined ASPB to learn more about professional development and opportunities in sciences outside the classroom.
SAPP volunteer students at plant-microbe interaction booth, Art in the park festival, Columbia. From left to right: Nhung Hoang, Ha Duong, Beverly Agtuca, Morgan Bruhn, Vinavi Lakshman. (source : ASPB news; Pictured by Dr. Melissa Mitchum).
“I am glad I joined ASPB because it helped me to be confident in the path I wanted to take for my future career and, most of all, to create innovative ideas for research.”
As a result, after finishing Ph.D. program with Dr. Gary Stacey, Beverly got a position at Adams State University, Alamosa, Corolado, as a visiting assistant professor. Congratulation Beverly!
For more information about ASPB : https://aspb.org/
On August 8th, An Pham defended his dissertation to earn his Ph.D. degree! Congratulation An! Thanks Dr. Stacey for your great advice.
Last but not least, family is a part of success.
This morning, Cuong Xuan Nguyen successfully defended this Ph.D. dissertation. Congratulations, Dr. Nguyen.
Cuong is the first Ph.D. student of Prof. Bing Stacey. Congratulations, Bing!
Friends and collaborators celebrating the nice poster of Ph.D. student Marina Cotta at the Brazilian Biochem and Mol Biol meeting. Left to right: Leonardo Cruz, Emanuel de Souza, Rose Adele Monteiro, Marina, Fabio Pedrosa. Another nice outcome of the long-standing UFPR-MU collaboration!
And, Marina just shared the nice SBBq award certificate. Congratulation, Marina.
At the Division of Plant Sciences graduation banquet on Wednesday, May 3, Beverly received the Millikan Award for Outstanding Research in Plant-Microbe interactions! One of the most outstanding graduate awards in MU’s DPS! For more background information on this award, please visit this website: https://plantsciences.missouri.edu/graduate/graduate-award-nominations/
Beverly’s research was on investigating the symbiotic relationships of nitrogen-fixing bacteria and detecting what metabolites are associated with colonization, BNF, and growth promotion in plants. Along with our lab collaborators at George Washington University, Washington D.C., and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at Washington State, she used an advanced and high-throughput technique called laser ablation electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (LAESI-MS) for in situ metabolic profiling. Overall, her data demonstrate that LAESI-MS holds tremendous potential for use in further studies of plant-microbe interactions.
Congratulations Bev!
On Wednesday, April 24th, Beverly presented her dissertation to her colleagues and the community at the LSC Monsanto Auditorium. Her title was “Exploring the symbiotic relationship of plants and microbes by mass spectrometry imaging.”
Congratulations to Beverly for passing her dissertation! Five years of hard work with 8 published articles and 3 upcoming manuscripts during her Ph.D.
Junior plant sciences major Sterling Evans is a recipient of the 2019 Goldwater Scholarship and a member of the campus Christian group, Veritas. Photo by Michael Cali.
“The Barry Goldwater Scholarship in Excellence Foundation looks for recipients who display a commitment to research in the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering.”
“I started doing research with bacteria that promote growth in plants my freshman year in [Curators’ Professor of Plant Sciences] Gary Stacey’s lab,” says Evans, at the time a participant in MU’s Freshman Research in Plant Sciences (FRIPS) Program. “I fell in love with it. My sophomore year I was working in genome editing with soybeans.”
For more information: https://fellowships.missouri.edu/2019/black-and-goldwater/
About Barry Goldwater Scholarship: https://goldwater.scholarsapply.org/
“Mr. MCCAUL. Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor the 148 inventors who will soon be inducted as the 2018 Fellows of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) in an induction ceremony in Houston, TX that will feature a keynote address by U.S. Commissioner for Patents Andrew Hirshfeld. In order to be named Fellow, these men and women were nominated by their peers and have undergone the scrutiny of the NAI Advisory and Selection Committees, having had their innovations deemed as making significant impact on quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society.
Collectively, this elite group holds nearly 4,000 patents. The individuals making up this year’s class of Fellows include individuals from 125 research universities and non-profit research institutes spanning the United States and the world. The now 1060-member group of Fellows is composed of more than 100 presidents and senior leaders of research universities and non-profit research institutes, nearly 500 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; 30 inductees of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, 57 recipients of the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation and U.S. National Medal of Science, over 30 Nobel Laureates, over 300 AAAS Fellows, 200 IEEE Fellows, and 164 Fellows of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, among other awards and distinctions.
The NAI was founded in 2010 to recognize and encourage inventors with patents issued from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, enhance the visibility of academic technology and innovation, encourage the disclosure of intellectual property, educate and mentor innovative students, and translate the inventions of its members to benefit society.
We are greatly indebted to innovators such as these for contributions to society through their inventions. I commend these individuals, and the organizations and taxpayers that support them, for the work they do to revolutionize the world we live in. As the following inventors are inducted, may it encourage future generations to strive to meet this high honor and continue the spirit of discovery and innovation.”
The extensions of remarks: https://www.congress.gov/116/crec/2019/04/15/CREC-2019-04-15-pt1-PgE465-5.pdf
Abstract from paper: “Mass spectrometry (MS) is an indispensable analytical tool to capture the array of metabolites within complex biological systems. However, conventional MS-based metabolomic workflows require extensive sample processing and separation resulting in limited throughput and potential alteration of the native molecular states in these systems. Ambient ionization methods, capable of sampling directly from tissues, circumvent some of these issues but require high-performance MS to resolve the molecular complexity within these samples. Here, we demonstrate a unique combination of laser ablation electrospray ionization (LAESI) coupled with a 21 Tesla Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (21T-FTICR) for direct MS analysis and imaging applications. This analytical platform provides isotopic fine structure information directly from biological tissues, enabling the rapid assignment of molecular formulas and delivering a higher degree of confidence for molecular identification.”
Link for the full text: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.analchem.8b05084