We are excited to welcome our newest graduate student, Kat Schmidt, to the program! Kat is from Iowa and has a long history of working in agriculture and research. She received her BA in Biology and Statistics from Swarthmore college in 2024, where she studied planarian aging and Arabidopsis heat stress response. In our program she will work on whole genome resequencing of wild rice as well as working to characterize indigenous agricultural systems. We are happy to have her!