Profile

• Time Zone

  Pacific

  
  
• Organization

  University of Utah

  
  
• Role

  Scientist Mentor: I will mentor teams of students online

  
  
• Research Interests (300 words)

  Crop wild relatives and their role in crop improvement. Exploring the effects of climate change on sagebrush-steppe habitat.

  
  
• Profile Question 1

  What is best about being a scientist?

  
  
• Answer the question you selected for profile question 1 here (300 words):

  Being outside! Spending days in the field is by far one of the best aspects of being a scientist.

  
  
• Profile Question 2

  What is your favorite plant? Why?

  
  
• Answer the question you selected for profile question 2 here (300 words):

  How can you ask a botanist to pick a favorite plant!? For certain I don't have a favorite, but there are many that capture my heart. I'm quite partial to Solanum melongena, our cultivated eggplant, and it's wild relatives. Crop wild relatives have a wealth of genetic resources that we can harness to improve drought and heat tolerance in our cultivated crops. I'm also a fan of Acer macrophyllum, big leaf maple, and Pseudostuga menziesii, Douglas fir, two trees that let me know I'm home in the Pacific Northwest.

  
  
• Profile Question 3

  What is tough about being a scientist?

  
  
• Answer the question you selected for profile question 3 here (300 words):

  If fieldwork and being outside are the highlights of being a scientist, the antithesis is certainly sitting at a desk and in front of a computer for long hours doing the nitty gritty work of data entry, cleaning, and crunching. Attention to detail during this part of the scientific process couldn't be more important though! After all, your results are only as good as your data.

  
  
• Capacity: How many teams at a time are you comfortable working with?

  1

  
  

Recent Posts

plants are my best fronds Stacy Kinsell Nov 22, 2017

Hey Team! What did y'all decide to do for your experiment? I can't wait to hear all about it!

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

bchsoreillyfall2017 project 10 Stacy Kinsell Nov 22, 2017

Any chance you could upload your google slides to our project page? I'd love to see how it all turned out!

plants are my best fronds Stacy Kinsell Nov 22, 2017

Hey Felix, sorry for the delayed reply! It's hard to say one area is my favorite to study, but I sure do enjoy researching the wild relatives of our crops. Most recently, I studied the crop wild relatives of eggplant. Do you like eating…

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Hey Felix, sorry for the delayed reply! It's hard to say one area is my favorite to study, but I sure do enjoy researching the wild relatives of our crops. Most recently, I studied the crop wild relatives of eggplant. Do you like eating eggplant? I do! There are 54 species that are related to the eggplant we grow on our farms and eat. I researched to find out which of those 54 species are tolerant to heat, drought, and pathogens. By knowing this we can be sure to collect these species for further study and to use them in breeding programs to help our cultivated eggplant be more resilient to water, heat, and pathogen stress. I like studying this because it has real-world, practical implications for how we can grow crops that are going to be resilient in the face of climate change.

What about you? Are there aspects of plants that are particularly interesting to you that you'd like to study or learn more about?