Are plants your specific interest or are you just exploring that path right now?

Right now, I'm exploring that one path more in depth, but with the colloquiums we're branching out. I don't know what I'm going to be interested in when I go through college and experience different things. It probably won't be exactly like this, but I wouldn't rule it out.

Does hope appear in the daily work that you do?

I'd definitely say so. We'll read published papers and the common trend always is that 'this thing was originally thought, but then it was disproven' or 'now we think this', and over time, we see all this progress in every single thing that we read. We're progressing through our current projects, and it all lends itself to the idea that everything is going to continue and it's going to improve. So I'd say that's a pretty hopeful trend to see.

How do you see your team’s work fitting into social change?

One paper we discussed was about plants, their diseases,and their relationship to agriculture and food accessibility throughout the world. We’re looking at Plantago as a model species for other plants by tracking how diseases change over an environmental gradient. This could be used for other plants that could potentially help increase yields, or decrease diseases that would be a detriment to food production. That's really important.