Danielle Way

My research combines manipulative experiments and modeling to better understand how plants will respond to future environments. Much of my work focuses on how carbon balance acclimates to high temperatures, but my goal is to understand the interplay between warming, rising CO2 and drought on plant physiology.

I'm also interested in the limits of plant stress tolerance: how far can you push a plant before it dies, and what is the critical physiological mechanism underlying mortality under different abiotic stresses? These questions can help provide crucial information on thresholds that must be avoided for a species or ecosystem, as well as targets for crop improvement.

Yulia Kroner

Email: ykroner@uwo.ca

Msc. Candidate

The world's climate is getting warmer and plant species across our ecosystems will be affected. Will boreal forests acclimate to these increasing temperatures or will the species in northern forests respond negatively to warming? Growth temperatures affect many physiological parameters in plants, such as photosynthesis, respiration and hydraulic traits. I am interested in understanding how higher growing season temperatures and elevated CO2 concentrations will change day respiration, dark respiration and photosynthesis in boreal conifers (Norway spruce and Scots pine). My work will help us predict how carbon uptake and carbon loss may react to future climate change in this important ecosystem.

Joseph Ronald Stinziano

Email: jstinzi@uwo.ca

PhD Candidate

My research interests can be summarized by the question: how will global climate change affect the biosphere? Global climate change is expected to cause myriad environmental changes. Environmental changes (stresses) tend to disrupt homeostasis in plants. Depending on the severity of the stress, a plant may restore homeostasis through acclimation. Understanding how plants respond to changes in absolute temperature, temperature variability, and water availability is pertinent to our ability to predict how the biosphere will respond to global change. Thus, I am interested in plant stress physiology and how plants cope with the stresses expected from global climate change, including temperature and water stress. My current project is a simulated climate change experiment using growth chambers. I subjected Norway spruce (Picea abies) to a simulated autumn (declining photoperiod and temperature) using London, Ontario conditions. One treatment involved using the average ambient temperature for London during autumn, while the second treatment used temperatures that were four degrees Celsius higher than the first treatment. At present, I am analyzing the photosynthetic data and tissue that I collected during the experiment to determine if there are any changes in photosynthetic capacity, photosynthetic proteins, or pigments.

Atiyyah Ferouz

MSc candidate, co-supervised with Dr. Lining Tian, Agriculture Canada

Optimizing cell-penetrating peptide transfection for soybean.

My research involves the development and optimization of cell-penetrating peptide (CPP) transfection, a transformation technology that has only recently been investigated for use in plants. This method involves the use of short peptide sequences with invasive properties to cross the cellular membrane. These sequences are known as cell-penetrating peptides or protein transduction domains and possess the ability to carry macromolecular cargo up to 100 times their size. My work focuses on improving the application of this technology in soybean. Soybean is a very important oilseed crop that has unfortunately only seen limited transfection success using the current methods available. It is my hope that my research will provide a new and more efficient avenue for genetic transformation in soybeans.

Farida Meerja

PhD candidate, co-supervised with Dr. Lining Tian, Agriculture Canada

To be updated.

Vi Bui

MSc candidate

Besides increases in temperature and atmospheric CO2, climate change also results in a drier climate. More frequent and intense droughts, termed "climate change-type drought", have resulted in large-scale forest dieback events that could be attributed to physiological causes. The acclimation of trees' hydraulic system to future climates, or a lack thereof, is therefore crucial in predicting large-scale carbon balance in response to climate change. My study, therefore, investigates the hydraulic traits of poplar (Populus tremuloides) in warmer growth temperatures and elevated CO2 and predicts the species' performance under drought stress.

Dr. Leonid Kurepin

Post-doctoral Associate (with Dr. Norm Hüner)

Email: lkurepin@uwo.ca

Nick Harris

To be updated.