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Confirmed Speakers:
Dean Jones, Emory University School of Medicine

Dean P. Jones, Ph.D. is Professor of Medicine (Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine) and Biochemistry at Emory University, Atlanta, GA. He is the Director of the Clinical Biomarkers Laboratory, Director of the Integrative Health Sciences Facility Core of the NIEHS-supported HERCULES Environmental Health Center and Co-Director of the Center for Clinical and Molecular Nutrition. He received a B.S. (1971) with honors in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of Illinois, Urbana. He trained with Howard S Mason, PhD, a pioneer in xenobiotic metabolism, at the Oregon Health Sciences University for his Ph.D. (1976). He was a National Sciences Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, Ithaca, and a Visiting Scholar in Molecular Toxicology at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, studying toxicologic mechanisms of cell death with the leading authority, Sten Orrenius, MD, PhD. He joined the faculty of Emory University in Biochemistry in 1979, promoted through the ranks and moving to the Department of Medicine to found the Clinical Biomarkers Laboratory in 2003. In 1997, he was appointed Nobel Fellow at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm. He has served in several leadership roles at Emory University, including Program Director of Nutrition Health Sciences, Radiation Safety Officer, Laboratory Director of the General Clinical Research Center, and Executive Committee of the Emory-Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute.

Dr. Jones studies redox biology and medicine, and currently has research programs in oxidative stress, redox systems biology and exposome medicine, with extensive collaborations in environmental epidemiology and health. Dr. Jones is recognized for his research in oxidative mechanisms of disease, subcellular redox compartmentalization and high-resolution metabolomics. He has developed many methods for analytical biochemistry and received many patents; his method for human plasma glutathione measurement is the most widely used method and the metabolomics methods developed by his team have been used to support hundreds of investigators in population, clinical and translational research. Dr. Jones has over 500 peer-reviewed publications with over 50,000 literature citations. He has received numerous research, mentorship and leadership awards. His research has been supported by the National Institute of Health Sciences (NIH Office of the Director, NIEHS, NHLBI, NIA, NIDDK, NIAAA, NCI, NEI, NIAID), Department of Defense, Office of Naval Research, American Heart Association and American Institute for Cancer Research. He has served on multiple editorial boards and grant review panels, including regular membership on NIH Alcohol and Toxicology (Chair), NCI Basic Mechanisms of Cancer Therapeutics, NIH Systemic Injury by Environmental Exposure and ad hoc participation in more than 40 others.

Xinnian Dong, Duke University

Xinnian Dong received her B.S. in microbiology from Wuhan University in China in 1982 and Ph.D. in molecular biology from Northwestern University in Chicago in 1988. She began her study of plant immune mechanisms as a postdoc at MGH, Harvard Medical School. Dong is currently an Arts & Sciences Professor of Biology at Duke University. Dong became a HHMI investigator in 2011, an AAAS fellow in 2011, a member of NAS in 2012, an AAM Fellow in 2013 and an outstanding alumna of Wuhan University in 2013. Dong received the Chinese Biological Investigators Society (CBIS) Ray Wu Award in 2018, named the Clarivate Highly Cited Researchers in 2018-2022. Awarded the Stephen Hales Prize by the American Society of Plant Biologists in 2022.

Richard Dixon, University of North Texas

Richard A. Dixon is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biological Sciences, University of North Texas, and Distinguished Visiting Lecturer of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study, Texas A and M University, College Station. He also holds adjunct professorships at the University of Missouri and Oklahoma State University. He was Distinguished Professor and Samuel Roberts Noble Research Chair, Senior Vice President and Founding Director of the Plant Biology Division at the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation, Ardmore, Oklahoma, where he worked from 1988-2013. He received his Bachelors’ and Doctoral degrees in Biochemistry and Botany from the University of Oxford, UK, and postdoctoral training in Plant Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, UK. He was awarded the Doctor of Science degree for his research achievements by the University of Oxford in 2004. His research interests center on the biochemistry, molecular biology and metabolic engineering of plant natural product pathways and their implications for agriculture and human health, and the engineering of lignocellulosic biomass for the improvement of forages and feedstocks for the bioeconomy. He has published over 530 papers and chapters on these and related topics in international journals, which have been cited over 95,000 times. Professor Dixon is a Fellow of the Royal Society (elected in 2018), Member of the US National Academy of Sciences (Plant and Soil Sciences Section, elected in 2007), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (elected in 2003), Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (elected in 2014), and Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists (elected in 2018), and has been named by the Institute for Scientific Information as one of the 10 most cited authors in the plant and animal sciences. He was President of the American Society of Plant Biologists (2015-16) and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Frank Van Breusegem, Universiteit Gent and VIB

Frank Van Breusegem is the group leader of the Oxidative Stress Signaling group at the VIB Center for Plant Systems Biology and full professor at Ghent University since 2001. Since his early studies under the supervision of em. Prof. Marc Van Montagu, he focuses on the molecular impact of oxidative stress on plant cells. He obtained his PhD from Ghent University (Ghent, 1997) with work on "Engineering Stress Tolerance in Maize". Nowadays, the primary objective of the Van Breusegem's lab is still the identification and functional analysis of regulatory gene and protein networks involved in the oxidative stress response in plants. Ultimately, he aims to translate this knowledge into biotechnological crop efficiency concepts. The lab has played a pioneering role in determining H2O2 dependent molecular and physiological responses in plants. The Van Breusegem lab is internationally recognized mainly because of its successful multi-omics driven approaches that allowed to identify several key targets in the oxidative stress response.

Alex Costa, University of Milan

Alex Costa is a Professor of Plant Physiology at the Università degli Studi di Milano; he is the scientific coordinator of the microscopy facility UNITECH NOLIMITS and the director of the Nikon Center of Excellence for Plant Biology and Other Life Sciences at the UMIL. He graduated in Natural Sciences at the Università degli Studi di Padova and obtained a PhD in Plant Biotechnology. He is the author of over 95 scientific publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals (Scopus: H-Index=36, citations>4.300). He is Associate Editor for Plant, Cell & Environment (IF 7.947), Royal Society Open Science, and he is a Faculty Member of Faculty Opinions.
His main research interests are aimed at understanding the role of second messengers in plant-environmental interactions, with particular attention on understanding the molecular mechanisms by which plants perceive and transduce external stimuli. In particular, he is interested in the study of calcium signalling using advanced imaging microscopy with plants expressing genetically encoded indicators. He has expertise in the field of ion transport, fluorescence microscopy, design of in vivo imaging analysis, genetically encoded indicators, FRET analysis.
He has served as a reviewer for international journals such as Nature, PNAS, Nature Communications, Nature Plants, Current Biology, Science Advances, Science Signaling, Cell Research, Plant Cell, New Phytologist, Plant Physiology....

Tessa Burch-Smith, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center

Dr. Tessa Burch-Smith is an Associate Member and Principal Investigator at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri. From 2012 to 2021, she was an Assistant then Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Cellular and Molecular Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She completed her graduate studies at Yale University with Dr. S. P. Dinesh-Kumar and post-doctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley with Dr. Patricia Zambryski. Her current research focuses on intercellular communication via plasmodesmata and her lab uses a variety of molecular and cell biological approaches including advanced light and electron microscopy and plant viruses, primarily in the Nicotiana benthamiana model. The Burch-Smith lab also investigates chloroplast gene expression and how chloroplast-to-nucleus retrograde signaling may control expression of nuclear genes related to plasmodesmata. She is also a Senior Editor and Associate Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions. She currently serves as Chair of the Science Policy Committee of the American Society of Plant Biologists and is a member of the ASPB Board of Directors.

Antje Heese, University of Missouri

Antje Heese is an Associate Professor in the Division of Biochemistry at the University of Missouri-Columbia (MU). She received her Master from the Ruhr Universität Bochum (Germany) and her Ph.D. from the Plant Research Lab at Michigan State University (USA). Her interdisciplinary training in protein trafficking and plant immunity has laid the foundation for her research program at MU on elucidating the roles of vesicular trafficking in plant immunity and nutrient acquisition. Her lab's main research centers on identifying clathrin-coated vesicle (CCV) core and accessory proteins that have novel roles in endocytosis and exocytosis of the plasma membrane (PM)-localized plant immune receptor FLAGELLIN SENSING2 (FLS2). Her lab is specifically interested in how CCV components modulate the spatiotemporal trafficking of FLS2 to and from the PM and their impact on plant immunity in response to flg22 and pathogenic Pseudomonas syringae bacteria. More recently, her lab has expanded their CCV studies to other protein with roles in plant defense and nutrient acquisition, including components modulating extracellular and intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) production and ROS homeostasis.

Federica Brandizzi, Michigan State University

Dr. Federica Brandizzi completed her PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Rome Tor Vergata (Rome, Italy) in 2007. After completing her PhD, she conducted two post-doctoral experiences at the University of Oxford, Oxford UK, and Oxford Brookes University, Oxford UK, to work on gene regulation and endomembranes in plant cells. In 2003, she accepted a prestigious Canada Research Chair to establish her first independent lab at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. In 2006, she opened a new lab at the DOE-Plant Research Laboratory at Michigan State University as an Associate Professor. She is currently an MSU Foundation Professor and MSU Distinguished Professor leading research on the role of endomembranes in plant growth, productivity, and stress responses. Since 2020, she has also been working as a Science Director of the Department of Energy Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC).

Won-Gyu Choi, University of Nevada, Reno

Won-Gyu Choi originally came from South Korea. Dr. Choi received his B.S./M.S. in Biotechnology from Woosuk University in Korea and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 2009. During his Ph.D., he studied characterizing biochemical and biological functions of members of aquaporins in Arabidopsis in plant development and stress responses. Then, as a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Choi began studying long-distance signals such as systemic calcium and ROS signalings in plants. He started his current position in the Fall of 2016 and is currently an associate professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Nevada, Reno. He continues his study on understanding the biological functions of long-distance calcium and ROS signaling in plants such as Arabidopsis, rice, and tomatoes in response to environmental stresses such as temperature stresses, water stress, and mechanical stress. Dr. Choi’s daily routine starts and finishes with walking his dog in the neighborhood before sunrise and sunset.

Yosef Fichman, University of Missouri

Dr. Yosef Fichman is an early career researcher in the University of Missouri who studies plant reactive oxygen species systemic signaling and acclimation in response to abiotic stresses, performing his postdoctoral training under the supervision of Dr. Ron Mittler. Dr. Fichman holds a PhD from Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel in Plant Molecular Biology for investigating the regulation of the Proline cycle during osmotic stress in plants.

Fiona Goggin, University of Arkansas

Fiona L. Goggin is a Professor in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at the University of Arkansas, and holds a Ph.D. in Entomology from the University of California, Davis, and a B.S. degree in Plant Science from Cornell University. Dr. Goggin's research explores mechanisms of plant immunity against herbivores, and the interplay between defense and primary metabolism in plants. A recent focus of her work is the influence of reactive oxygen species signaling and fatty acid desaturation in the chloroplast on resistance to aphids, a large and damaging family of phloem-feeding insects. Dr. Goggin also currently directs the Arkansas Bioimaging Facility for Agricultural Research
( https://bioimagingfacility.uark.edu/).

Aardra Kachroo, University of Kentucky

Aardra Kachroo is a Professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Kentucky where she directs a lab exploring the molecular mechanisms underlying plant systemic immune responses to microbes. Her research focuses on identifying and characterizing molecular signals essential to the systemic immune response, understanding their long-distance transport routes, and examining the overlap between systemic responses to pathogenic versus beneficial microbes. She is also co-founder of Phytogenesis LLC, which is commercializing plant-based products for disease management in agriculture. She received her PhD at the M.S. University of Baroda, India. She was a Rockefeller Foundation graduate research fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and a postdoctoral associate at Duke University and Cornell University.

David Mendoza-Cózatl, University of Missouri

David Mendoza-Cózatl is an Associate Professor of Plant Stress Biology at the University of Missouri, Columbia, USA. He received his PhD in Biochemistry from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico and completed a PEW postdoctoral fellowship at UC San Diego. His research focuses on understanding how plants acquire nutrients from the environment and allocate them throughout the plant, and this includes nutrient sensing and the molecular mechanisms behind plant adaptation to changing levels of nutrients. Understanding these mechanisms is critical to achieve food security and sustainable agriculture.

Gloria Muday, Wake Forest University

Gloria K. Muday is the Charles M. Allen Professor of Biology at Wake Forest University. She received her PhD and BS in Biochemistry from Purdue University and Virginia Tech, respectively. Dr. Muday's research examines how reactive oxygen species can act as both developmental signals and stress signals using both biochemical and imaging approaches. Her laboratory explores how hormone induced ROS drives root development and guard cell signaling in Arabidopsis and how temperature stress elevates ROS and impairs pollen performance in tomato. Studies in her laboratory also include how localized synthesis of flavonol antioxidants can keep ROS from reaching damaging levels to allow produce ROS signaling. Dr. Muday is the director of the Center for Molecular Signaling at Wake Forest University.

Romy Schmidt, Universität Bielefeld

Romy Schmidt-Schippers received her diploma in biology from the University of Potsdam in Germany in 2008 and her Ph.D in molecular biology from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Physiology and the University of Potsdam in Potsdam, Germany in 2013. In 2013, she was awarded the Michelson Prize of the University of Potsdam for her outstanding dissertation. During her Ph.D and postdoctoral period, her research focused on stress sensing and signaling in plants involving early-acting transcription factors. In addition to molecular signaling pathways under salt stress in rice, signal integration under flooding stress (hypoxia) in model plants and major cereal species, such as barley, is the subject of current investigations. Schmidt-Schippers is currently an assistant professor of plant biotechnology at Bielefeld University and is group leader at the Center for Biotechnology in Bielefeld, Germany.

Lee-Ann Niekerk, University of the Western Cape

Lee-Ann Niekerk is a researcher at the University of the Western Cape. She received her education at the University of the Western Cape. Her PhD thesis was titled: Iron deficiency alleviation by exogenous Indole-3-carboxaldehyde in Phaseolus vulgaris L. seedling roots. She was conferred various funding awards and even received the opportunity to conduct research at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She contributed to multiple publications. Her most recent collaboration on a manuscript: Decoding Heavy Metal Stress Signalling in Plants: Towards Improved Food Security and Safety, which focuses on Food security, emphasizing her main goal in life, improving food security in South Africa.

Shahid Siddique, University of California Davis

I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Entomology and Nematology at the University of California, Davis. I completed my PhD at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria. Afterward, I moved to Germany where I worked as a research group leader at the University of Bonn. In 2019, I relocated to Davis and established my own lab. My research focuses on studying the fundamental and practical aspects of the interaction between parasitic nematodes and their host plants. Through my work, I aim to deepen our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying plant-nematode interactions, with the ultimate goal of developing new resources to mitigate the impact of nematodes on crop plants.

Sunghun Park, Kansas State University

Dr. Park is an expert in gene transformation, gene functional analysis, and comparative genome-wide transcriptional profiling. During the past 20 years, Sunghun Park has worked on understanding redox-mediated plant adaptation mechanisms to abiotic stresses and physiological disorders in fruits and vegetables that involve calcium regulation and abiotic stress. Park has successfully established a genetic engineering system using Agrobacterium-mediated transformation in crop species to determine how the genome sequences cause plant phenotypes. Park is a professor at the Department of Horticulture and Natural Resources, Kansas State University. He has over 30 years of experience in plant tissue culture and genetic transformation of numerous plant species.

Kyaw (Joe) Aung, Iowa State University

Dr. Kyaw (Joe) Aung is an Assistant Professor at Iowa State University. Dr. Aung's laboratory is interested in studying the function of plasmodesmata during plant-microbe interaction using Arabidopsis thaliana-Pseudomonas syringae pathosystem.

Ruthie Angelovici, University of Missouri

The Angelovici lab's main research aims are to uncover the molecular mechanisms regulating amino acids network's response to multiple cellular demands and environmental changes and to understand the evolutionary forces and developmental constraints that shaped them. The lab mainly focused on the identification of the genetic and metabolic networks regulating seed amino acids content and composition to facilitate enhanced seed biofortification. Toward this goal, the lab utilizes advanced analytical methods, quantitative and reverse genetics as well as multi-omic integration approaches.

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