Meet the many integral members of the department and learn about their horticultural career journeys in our new series, This is my Hort-Story!
Current job title: Associate Professor
Current lab/team: Shannon Lab
Time spent working in the Department of Horticultural Science: 9 years
Pronouns: She/Her
The thing that brought me to a career in horticulture was…
I’ve long been interested in plant genetics. I originally worked on maize. I was attracted to potato because it is central to cuisines and cultures around the world, but we know so much less about it than we do about other staple crops, in part because it is a highly heterozygous auto-tetraploid. There are so many open and important questions about potatoes, and potatoes are a horticultural crop which is how I wound up here.
The professional accomplishment that fills me with pride so far this year is…
Serving as the advisor for Sapphire Coronejo, who successfully defended her masters work using diploidized potatoes to describe the many dimensions of diversity in the tetraploid potato genome!
The most enjoyable/rewarding part of my work is…
I like working with grad students and I like project planning both with my team and collaborators.
The most unusual part of my job is…
My group has spent a lot of time trying to figure out where we can deep fry french fries on campus, which I have to admit is not the kind of problem I thought I’d be solving when I was a Ph.D. student in Genetics.
My favorite thing about working in the department is…
Getting to learn about everyone else’s weird genomes! Both turf grass and arctic daisy have continuous distributions of genome sizes (how?). Somehow rose produces individuals of multiple ploidies from single crosses (a real mapping challenge). I honestly love it when people bring me their unexpected genetics results.
My favorite time of year on campus is…
I like harvest, even though I’m actually at the ROCs and not on campus. It’s fun to see if anything we’ve done worked. We’re going to harvest diploid potatoes from our trial field for the first time this fall!
How a member of my family describes what I do for work...
My parents live next to campus, so I asked them:
Our daughter blends her undergraduate degree in anthropology and doctoral degree in plant genetics to span the gaps in her ethnic heritage - Irish, French, and Lithuanian. She breeds potatoes in order to avoid famine; she partners with Pepsi to produce better chipping potatoes; and she ensures that UMN breeds are delectably crushable to inspire blynai.
When I’m not working you can find me…
With my cats (Arithmetic and Qubit) and my husband on our giant purple couch - reading novels, playing complicated board games, or starting crafts I won’t finish.
People may be surprised to know that…
I was a kindergarten drop out.