I am a PhD student working with Gail Taylor, Troy Magney and Tom Buckley and am interested in the genetic and physiological basis of climate adaptative stress tolerance in plants. My dissertation research uses a diverse population of Populus Trichocarpa (Black Cottonwood) to investigate the mechanisms of drought tolerance. Current work includes developing high throughput phenotyping methods (e.g. remote sensing) to characterize phenotypic diversity of this population planted in a large field site in Davis. Prior to starting at UC Davis, I earned an undergraduate degree at the University of Bonn, Germany, where I conducted research with Thomas Gaiser in Benin, Africa, studying at the impact of rainfed rice in natural wetlands on soil carbon storage. I continued as a Masters student at the University of Bonn with Michelle Watt from the research Center in Juelich and Amelia Henry from the International rice research institute in the Philippines, investigating drought stress recovery in rice. After completing my Masters, I spend a year as a research assistant working at the Max-Planck-Institute for developmental biology in Detlef Weigel’s lab, studying plant pathogen interactions.