{"id":137828,"date":"2026-06-23T09:10:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T13:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/?p=137828"},"modified":"2026-06-23T09:10:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T13:10:07","slug":"first-simons-postdoctoral-fellows-in-plant-biology-announced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/2026\/06\/23\/first-simons-postdoctoral-fellows-in-plant-biology-announced\/","title":{"rendered":"First Simons Postdoctoral Fellows in Plant Biology Announced"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":432,"featured_media":137830,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life-sciences","news_type-announcement"],"acf":{"block_editor":[{"acf_fc_layout":"image","type":"image_medium","image":137831,"title":"","caption":"photosteve\/Alamy","caption_full":"","less_margin":false},{"acf_fc_layout":"text","text":"To introduce fresh perspectives that could advance the field of plant biology, the Simons Foundation has named nine researchers as its first Simons Postdoctoral Fellows in Plant Biology. This fellowship provides financial support to researchers who intend to pursue a career in basic research on fundamental problems in plant biology. It places a particular emphasis on candidates with expertise in disciplines that could be brought to bear on plant biology, including but not limited to engineering, computational modeling, theory, chemistry, synthetic biology and physics.\r\n\r\nThis year\u2019s fellows and their projects and affiliations are listed below:\r\n\r\n<strong>Michael Burnett<\/strong>\r\n<em>Using fractal theory to improve functional models of vegetation<\/em>\r\nUniversity of California, Davis, laboratory of Brian Bailey\r\n\r\n<strong>Jie Chu<\/strong>\r\n<em>Mapping spatial landscapes of metabolites to reveal regulators of plant stem cell behavior<\/em>\r\nUniversity of California, San Diego, laboratory of Alexandra Dickinson\r\n\r\n<strong>Annalise Kane<\/strong>\r\n<em>Investigating the role of flavonols in drought and heat response using genetically encoded biosensors<\/em>\r\nUniversity of California, Riverside, laboratories of Sean Cutler and Ian Wheeldon\r\n\r\n<strong>Hongwoo Lee<\/strong>\r\n<em>Machine learning-guided sequence manipulation for tailored spatial gene regulation in plants<\/em>\r\nUniversity of Georgia, laboratories of Ethan Pickering and Robert Schmitz\r\n\r\n<strong>Michael Passalacqua<\/strong>\r\n<em>Revealing NLR guard-guardee relationships with perturbational single cell sequencing<\/em>\r\nNew York University, laboratories of Shao-shan Carol Huang (NYU) and Ernest Fraenkel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)\r\n\r\n<strong>Murillo Rodrigues<\/strong>\r\n<em>Enabling genome-wide genealogies in complex plant genomes<\/em>\r\nUniversity of California, Davis, laboratory of Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra\r\n\r\n<strong>Elissa Sorojsrisom<\/strong>\r\n<em>Molecular basis of chloroplast theft and maintenance in a photosynthetic animal<\/em>\r\nHarvard University, laboratory of Corey Allard\r\n\r\n<strong>Elena Stiles<\/strong>\r\n<em>Uncovering ancient Amazonia: integrating paleobotanical and novel stable isotope proxies to reconstruct Pleistocene plant-climate interactions and forest resilience<\/em>\r\nCalifornia Institute of Technology, laboratory of Julia Tejada\r\n\r\n<strong>Derek Wei<\/strong>\r\n<em>Computational design and testing of high-efficiency photosynthetic proteins in plants<\/em>\r\nNorth Carolina State University, laboratories of Colleen Doherty and Nathan Ennist"}]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137828"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/432"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137828"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137834,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137828\/revisions\/137834"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}