Organizers
Pei-Ling Yu
Pei-Ling is a Postdoctoral Associate at University of Florida in the Department of Plant Pathology. Her research focuses on developing a diagnostic tool for phytopathogenic fungi. She is recently working on designing bioinformatic pipelines of rapid pathogen identification and evaluating slash pine seedlings for disease tolerance against pitch canker causing agents Fusarium circinatum
Jeremy T. Brawner
Jeremy is an Assistant Professor in the Plant Pathology Department at University of Florida. He joined the faculty of the UF Department of Plant Pathology in 2019, with responsibilities in research and extension on Tree Health Genetic Resources. His research program is focused on developing disease tolerant tree crops and his extension program delivers these varieties to a range of stakeholders. He works with forest and tree crop managers in Florida, the US, and abroad to develop more efficient disease screening and breeding programs.
Jeremy T. Brawner | Google Scholar | Linkedin
Instructors
Abigail Stack
Abbie is a Science Fellow and Discovery Pathology Research Lead at Bayer Crop Science in Woodland, CA. Her specialties include viruses of vegetables, high throughput sequencing based disease detection, and molecular biology. Prior to her time at Bayer, Abbie received a M.S. in Plant Pathology from UC Davis studying a fungal canker disease of almond trees.
Kacie Quello
Kacie is a Discovery Pathology Specialist Sr at Bayer Crop Science. She received her Master’s in plant pathology at Purdue working on apple scab and brown rot of stone fruit. In recent years, she has worked with diseases on broccoli, lettuce, and spinach. The pathogens include oomycetes, bacteria, and fungi. In addition, she works with new molecular technologies to detect plant pathogens for disease diagnosis.
Joshua L. Konkol
Josh is a graduate research fellow at the University of Florida’s Department of Plant Pathology working in Dr. Jeremy Brawner’s Forestry Genetics laboratory and Dr. Jeff Rollins’s Molecular Fungal Pathology laboratory. He is interested in the host-pathogen interactions of fungi that cause vascular wilt disease and the development of germplasm with tolerance to them. He is currently investigating Harringtonia lauricola, the causal agent of laurel wilt disease, which is an extremely virulent and lethal pathogen that affects North American Lauracea trees such as avocado, bay and sassafras.
Joshua Konkol | Google Scholar | Linkedin
Andrew J. Gitto
Andrew Gitto is a PhD student in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Florida, Gainesville Campus. His PhD project focuses on identifying and predicting disease resistance in Theobroma cacao, the chocolate tree, using genotypic and phenotypic data. The major disease of study is black pod rot caused predominantly by Phytophthora palmivora and Phytophthora megakarya. Prior to attending graduate school at the University of Florida, Andrew worked as a lab manager and research assistant at the Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina, in the department of Plant and Environmental Sciences.
Owen H. Hudson
Owen Hudson is a PhD student working under Dr. Jeremy Brawner at the University of Florida in the plant pathology department. He obtained his master’s degree in plant pathology from the University of Georgia working on novel methods of molecular disease detection. Currently he studies predictive genomics for developing disease resistance to Fusarium ear rot in maize with the use of machine learning for high throughput phenotyping.
Special Thanks
Jose C. Huguet-Tapia
Jose is a Research Assistant Scientist in the Plant Pathology Department at the University of Florida. He is a molecular microbiologist and bioinformatician and leads the Bioinformatics and Big Data Committee within the Department that focus on computational resources and research within the Department. His research aims to answer fundamental questions concerning bacterial pathogenicity. His expertise encompasses areas in genomics and molecular biology. He is also mainly specialized in the development of bioinformatics pipelines for the study of plant pathogenic bacteria.
Jose C. Huguet-Tapia | Google Scholar | Twitter | Github
Plant Pathology Department at University of Florida
Find out more about the department here.