Kate Pogue

High School apprentice

What brought you to Tyson?

“The past two years I've been working in the children's garden at the Missouri Botanical Garden running little education stations for families. And through that I got to know a lot of the staff that worked in the children's garden. I was in a program called SAGE, Students As Garden Educators. SAGE is part of a St. Louis community organization for teens, and SIFT and TERA are part of it, too. I went to one of the events and they were talking about TERA. I thought, ‘Whoa, this is so cool.’”

In the past few days, what are some questions or observations that have come up for you working on the Plant Disease team?

“Probably just the real life aspect of doing experiments. They had a ton of plants out in the mesocosms and all of them withered and died. The team just had to improvise, go with it and come up with new ideas. Also in the hoophouse we've had some problems. We inoculated some of the plants with this fungal pathogen that we're studying, but it didn't really take to the plants. We haven't been able to find any on the plants. That has been a difficulty. The team's just rolling with it and coming up with new variations that they can study. I didn't really expect for real things to happen, where the plan just has to change and you just have to roll with it. You can still get really useful information.”

Kate worked with Rachel Penczykowski's Plant Disease team during summer 2019. Learn more about their host-pathogen coevolution research here.