Achievement

The Plant Systems Biology (PSB) IGERT training grant has a key goal of interdisciplinary training of graduate students with different undergraduate training backgrounds. A requirement for IGERT students is that they have two mentors from two distinct backgrounds, one of them being plant science related and the other one being for example computer sciences, bioengineering, chemistry or statistical sciences. IGERT graduate students attend lab meetings of both mentoring labs, and pursue interdisciplinary training, which among other outcomes enables our students to work with members of both labs and communicate in the typically distinct languages of both disciplines. This training is leading to innovative research of graduate students, as indicated by the publications of our IGERT students. For example the research of Matthew Schultz, who was originally trained in Genetics has led to systems biology/ computational publications in Nature (2013) and Science (2011) among other journals.