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IPG Students Receive BSA Research Awards



Two IPG graduate students have received this year's Graduate Student Research Awards from the Botanical Society of America (BSA).

Tatiana Arias, a first-year graduate student Alejandra Jaramillo's lab in the Division of Biological Sciences, received the award for her proposal "Did adaptation to different light environments facilitate the diversification of neotropical Piper (Piperaceae)? Phylogeny and evolution of plant architecture of Piper clade Radula." Her evolutionary study of factors that promote the emergence of different forms in a single genus will shed light on different types of diversification among plants. Arias, who is originally from Medellín, Colombia, will be using the monetary award to fund a trip to Colombia to begin collecting plants and gathering data from the field.

Patrick Edger, a graduate student in Chris Pires' lab the Division of Biological Sciences, won the national research award for his proposal "Resolving the phylogeny of the mustard family (Brassicaceae) and its application to date two ancestral whole genome duplication events and to reconstruct the ancestral karyotype for phylogenomics." His study will help to clarify the evolutionary relationship between the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, on which many genetic studies are based, and agriculturally important crop plants in the same family, including canola and the cole crops. Edger, who is currently in his third year of his graduate work, will be using the award to begin measuring the genome size of nearly 200 taxonomic groups.

The purpose of the BSA Graduate Student Research Award is to support and promote graduate student research in the botanical sciences.

The Botanical Society of America, one of the world's largest societies devoted to the study of plants and allied organisms, was established in 1906. The BSA promotes and encompasses all areas of plant biology.