Undergraduate student Alyka Zahnd and her research mentor, Dr. Csengele Barta, associate professor in the department of biology, have been recognized and recently featured in the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) Newsletter, reaching an international audience. Zahnd and Dr. Barta’s research proposal, “Offense and Defense strategies in plants’ chemical warfare for resources and survival: Can native ‘heroes’ rescue other native plant species, sensitive to allelopathic inhibition, triggered by highly competitive invasive species” has been selected as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship winner, providing Zahnd and Dr. Barta laboratory funding to perform the project. Alyka and Dr. Barta have also been featured at the 2021 Plant Biology international meeting and they will be presenting the results of the project at the 2022 Plant Biology meeting.
