PlantGrads

Wesley George is a 3rd year PhD candidate in the Cutler Lab at the University of California – Riverside, where he works to expand the toolkit of small molecule biosensors available across biological systems, with a particular focus on bringing new sensing capabilities to plants. Wesley completed his undergraduate training at the University of Washington, where he worked in the Nemhauser and Steinbrenner labs gaining experience in plant development, herbivory, and synthetic biology. He continued pursuing plant synthetic biology when he joined the Cutler Lab, where he now uses yeast as a platform to engineer and validate biosensors for deployment in plants.

Simoné Murguia is a 2nd year PhD student in the Botany and Plant Sciences program at University of California, Riverside in Dr. Hailing Jin’s research group. Simoné completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa studying maize genetics and genomics in Dr. Gernot Presting’s lab, and she currently studies cross kingdom RNA communication via extracellular vesicles between plants and microbes, and leverages this biological understanding for the development of crop protection strategies against pathogens.