2009 ASPB Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship award an...( I am a junior at Barnard College maj...)

I am a junior at Barnard College, majoring in Biology, with a Chemistry minor. This is my first year working with SURF, but am grateful for the opportunity to pursue my research with the plant, Spergularia marina. I plan to go to get my doctorate in either plant biology or biotechnology, where I can continue to do research and refine my knowledge of the plants that share our environment.

Starr Matsushita, University of Puget Sound Mentor: Andreas Madlung
A role for aneuploidy as a means for hybrid speciation in the genus Arabidopsis

I am incredibly happy to receive such a prestigious fellowship for the summer of 2009. I extend a warm thanks to the ASPB SURF committee and my research advisor Dr. Andreas Madlung for their wonderful contribution to my research. My interest in plant biology began last summer when I started studying the possible effects of aneuploidy on the evolution of an Arabidopsis allopolyploid, and was able to find some extremely interesting results. Thanks to the ASPB-SURF, this summer, I will be able to continue this fascinating exploration into the inner workings of the Arabidopsis genome and its response to aneuploid-induced stress. I am also excited to meet all of the other recipients of this fellowship and to learn about the most recent advances in plant biological research at the ASPB conference in 2010!

HONORABLE MENTIONS

CATEGORY A

Chen Gu, Macalester College Mentor: William Gray
Characterization of the Cellular Targets of the SAUR19 protein in Arabidopsis thaliana

As a sophomore from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, I started my adventure in plant biology in the summer of 2008, when I was first exposed to yeast hybrid systems. The project titled above is going to use a reverse 2-hybrid system to screen for mutated SAUR19 proteins that no longer interact with a known protein interactor. This project can both elucidate the domains of the SAUR19 pr
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