Interdisciplinary Plant Group

IPG Celebrates it's 40th Anniversary

2021 marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of the IPG. The anniversary celebrations kicked off on Monday, October 18th with a seminar series. Dr. Chris Daubert, Vice Chancellor and Dean of the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resource’s made some opening remarks.

Dr. Doug Randall was then presented with the IPG Excellence Award. This is awarded on an ad hoc basis to a faculty member who demonstrate exceptional efforts and commitment to the IPG and the interdisciplinary study of plant biology and research at MU. This award has previously been awarded to Dr. Walter Gassmann and Dr. John Walker.

Dr. Michael Luethy, an alum from the 1990’s. then presented a seminar on “MU and IPG in the 90’s, a great start to a rewarding career in plant science” and talked about his experiences as a postdoc at MU and his career path.

The 40th Anniversary Seminar Series continues until November 29th and will feature seminars from alumni from each of the four decades of the IPG, as well as two additional seminars from recent IPG alumni, discussing their research and career paths.

Zoom information can be found at: https://ipg.missouri.edu/40thAnnivSeries.pdf

Monday, October 25th - 3:30 PM
2000’s: Huachun Larue, Global Breeding Reproductive Systems Team Lead, Bayer Crop Science, St. Louis, MO
“Reproductive Biology to Enable Precision Breeding”

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 3rd - 3:30 PM
2010’s: Jeongmin Choi, Royal Society University Research Fellow, Crop Science Centre, University of Cambridge, UK
“Plasticity of arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis”

Monday, November 8th - 3:30 PM
1980’s: Eric Triplett, Department Chair, Microbiology and Cell Science, University of Florida-Gainesville
“Reflections on the influence of the MU IPG on my research, teaching, and administrative career”

Monday, November 15th - 3:30 PM
2010’s: Kirby Swatek, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Molecular Machines and Signaling, Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Martinsried, Germany
“The architecture of ubiquitin signaling”i>

Monday, November 29th - 3:30 PM
2010’s: Joint Seminar
“IPG Scientists in the Business of Making Scientific Discoveries Commercial Realities: Stories from St. Louis’s 39N AgTech Innovation District”

• Carola Dowd, Site Operations Lead, CTC Genomics, St. Louis
  “Developing and implementing an operational framework for CTC Genomics: A Brazilian gene editing sugarcane company based in St. Louis, MO”
• Candace Seeve, Director, Laboratory Operations, TechAccel, St. Louis, MO
  “Bridging the Innovation Valley of Death to Bring RNAi Biopesticides to Market”