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Mr. Richard Bugbee is our student-invited 2021 Gomez-Pompa speaker. Mr. Bugbee is an instructor of ethnobotany and ethnoecology at Kumeyaay Community College, and has been a Southern California tribal cultural practitioner for several decades. He is also an advisor for the Oakland Museum of California and the Phoebe Hearst Museum at UC Berkeley. He was curator of the Kumeyaay Culture Exhibit at Southern Indian Health Council, the indigenous education specialist for the San Diego Museum of Man, board member for the Native American Advisory Council for California State Parks and California Indian Basketweavers Association, and the Elders’ Circle for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. He is currently the chairman of the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival.
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Dr. Rishi Masalia is our 2021 student-invited Yermanos speaker. Dr. Masalia earned his PhD at the University of Georgia researching the relationship between variations in sunflower root morphology and drought tolerance. In the spirit of UC Riverside's own Dr. Demetrios Yermanos, Rishi's graduate and postdoctoral research helped further our understanding of stress tolerance in this important oilseed crop. From there, Dr. Masalia took on an essential role in LeafWorks Inc., a start-up company based in California. LeafWorks works primarily with the burgeoning cannabis/hemp industry to establish botanical descriptions and genetic portfolios for new cultivars. LeafWorks offers innovative products and services that stand to significantly improve cannabis breeding, cultivation, and branding. Dr. Masalia has held several leadership positions, including Director of Bioinfomatics, Communications Manager, and Director of Data Science.
Photo from Dr. Haswell's lab website
Dr. Elizabeth Haswell is a professor at the Washington University in St. Louis and is interested in the ways that molecules and cellular structures perceive force. Little is known about signaling in response to stimuli that are mechanical in nature, such as touch, osmotic pressure, or gravity -- signals that are crucial for the normal growth and development of plants. Her laboratory's work promises novel insight into the strategies used by both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells to sense these mechanical stimuli. Her lab is interested in asking big questions about plant biology, effectively communicating their results, and creating a diverse community of support, growth, and fun. Her academic mission includes advocating for an academic culture that values sustainability, diversity, and authenticity.
Photo from Dr. Halane's Twitter
Dr. Morgan Halane is a New York City-based biologist with a focus on plant immunity, specifically plant pathogen effectors (small molecules which manipulate host cells to benefit the pathogen yet can betray it to the host’s immune surveillance system). Dr. Halane holds a PhD from the University of Missouri in Columbia and continued his training as a postdoctoral researcher first at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in South Korea and is now, at the University of California, Riverside continuing his postdoctoral work. Outside of academia, Dr. Halane's expertise has been utilized in both the private and public sectors with roles at the Brooklyn-based startup company Aanika Biosciences and the National Park Service. Dr. Halane is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and has served as a mentor to students severely underrepresented in the life sciences. He is a co-founder of the 2020 #BlackBotanistsWeek social media initiative, a follow-up to Black Birders Week which was itself spurred by the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery, in addition to the Central Park birdwatching incident recorded by Christian Cooper.
Photo from UC Riverside Profiles
Dr. Exequiel Ezcurra has devoted his 30-year research career as a plant ecologist to nature conservation, land-ocean interactions, and the management of natural resources. His achievements include developing the first environmental impact assessments and promoting the California Condor release program in Baja California. A fellow of the Ecological Society of America and fellow of the Mexican Academy of Sciences, he has published more than 170 papers and books, developed two Museum exhibits and an award-winning film on the Sea of Cortés: Ocean Oasis. In 1994, he received the Conservation Biology Award from the Society of Conservation Biology followed by the Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation in 2006. Dr. Ezcurra's diverse research interests include conservation science, the biogeography of coastal deserts, and the application of mathematical modeling in ecology and conservation. He is currently a professor of ecology in the Botany and Plant Sciences department at UCR.
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Dr. Andrea Arias joined Dupont-Pioneer as a Research Scientist in the Research Information Management group. In this role, she worked with software development teams to deploy phenotypic and genotypic evaluation methodologies for emerging crops. In 2015, she started leading the strategy and portfolio of the data science and informatics efforts working closely with the seed product development, software development, automation engineering, data science, data engineering teams on projects that helped transform, automate, and optimize Corteva’ s plant breeding operations, analytical methods and decision systems. Most recently, she accepted a role as a Data Science Leader group in the Farming Systems and Digital team within Corteva. She is also a member of the Corteva Laurate community since 2020, this group works across functions to bring in innovation, scientific guidance, and provide mentoring to young scientists at Corteva.
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Dr. Anna Locke is a Research Plant Physiologist at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service. The Locke lab is interested in crop-environment interactions, especially abiotic stress. They study G × E interactions among diverse soybean germplasm and aim to identify mechanisms that determine stress tolerance and seed composition. Dr. Locke completed her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a post-doctoral position at UC Riverside.
Photo from Podchaser: The Story Collider
Dr. Sonia Zárate is the Program Officer for Undergraduate and Graduate Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), Past-President of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), and a Master Facilitator for the National Research Mentoring Network (NRMN) and Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research (CIMER). In all of her positions, she leads efforts to foster an inclusive scientific enterprise and is committed to the development of scientists from populations that have been historically underrepresented. Prior to her current appointment at HHMI, she was the director for the Office of Undergraduate Research at the University of San Diego, adjunct faculty at Miramar Community College, and the associate director for the Undergraduate Research Center-Sciences at UCLA. Dr. Zárate received her PhD in Plant Biology from UC Riverside, where she studied defense signaling in Arabidopsis. She was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Riverside studying plant-insect interactions.
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