Gabriella King 

Graduate Student (Ph.D.), 2025 Fall - Present

I’m Gabriella King, a PhD student working on developing synthetic inducible promoters to regulate the expression of Emerald Ash Borer resistance genes in Black Ash (Fraxinus nigra). I completed my undergraduate degree from the University of Tennessee, where I majored in Plant Science with a concentration in Plant Genetics and Biotechnology. During my undergraduate experience, I worked as an undergraduate researcher and assistant for the Center of Agricultural Synthetic Biology. My previous research topics include chloroplast transformations, plastid metabolic engineering, and the development of mini-synplastomes. For this work, I was awarded the Advanced Undergraduate Research Award (AURA), the Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award, and the Distinction in Undergraduate Research Award. A fun fact about me, while all my research involves vascular plants, my favorite plants are non-vascular plants (ferns, mosses, etc.)