Confirmed Speakers
Talks & Panel discussions: NatSci 128 (Keynotes, Technical/Lightning talks, and WiDS Career Panel)
Lunch: NatSci 150
Posters: NatSci 145
MSU Foundation Professor & William J Beale Distinguished Faculty
Director, Plant Resilience Institute
Department of Plant Biology,
Michigan State University
Email | Webpage | Twitter | Google Scholar
Dr. C. Robin Buell received her Ph.D. from Utah State University in 1992 and was a postdoctoral fellow in the DOE Plant Research Laboratory at Michigan State University, followed by a USDA and then a NIH postdoctoral fellowship at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Plant Biology in Stanford, CA. In 1997, she accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Louisiana State University. In 1999, she joined the faculty at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, MD where she remained until 2007 when she joined the Department of Plant Biology at MSU. Her research is focused on the genome biology of plants and plant pathogens, including comparative genomics, bioinformatics, and computational biology. Her research involves crop plants (corn, rice, potato, sweet potato), biofuels (switchgrass), and medicinal/herbal plants (periwinkle, mints, nightshade, ginseng, Camptotheca) while her work with plant pathogens has focused primarily on bacteria and oomycetes. She was a central member of the consortium that generated the rice genome sequence, a crop that feeds 50% of the world’s population every day, and developed a public database for rice researchers that receives over two million visits each year from scientists across the world. From her work on medicinal plants, she developed and maintains the Medicinal Plant Genomics Resource that has enabled discoveries in natural product biosynthesis. Currently, she maintains Spud DB, a database focused on potato genomic datasets, and the Maize Genome Resource for gene expression mining in maize. She has received funding from NSF, USDA, DOE, NIH, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and published over 200 papers. Dr. Buell has an active research group composed of postdoctoral research fellows, research assistants, graduate students, undergraduate students, and high school interns and collaborates with scientists across the United States and throughout the world. She has served as an editor at Plant Physiology, the Plant Genome, Crop Science, Frontiers in Plant Genetics and Genomics, and Plant Cell. She has served as an advisor to several large plant genome research consortia and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Genetically Engineered Crops. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement for Science and the American Society of Plant Biologists.
Adjunct Professor, University of British Columbia, Canada
Software Engineer at RStudio
Email | Webpage | Twitter | GitHub | Impactstory | Google Scholar
Jenny Bryan (twitter, GitHub) is a Software Engineer at RStudio, working on the team lead by Hadley Wickham. This team brings you the popular set of packages known as the Tidyverse, as well as a set of low-level infrastructure packages. She is on leave from being an Associate Professor of Statistics at the University of British Columbia. Jenny has an undergraduate degree in Economics and German Literature from Yale University and earned her PhD in Biostatistics at UC Berkeley.
Jenny has been using and teaching R (or S!) for 20 years, most recently in STAT 545 and Software Carpentry. Other aspects of her R life include ordinary membership in the R Foundation, work with rOpenSci, development/maintenance of R packages (such as readxl), and leading the curriculum development for UBC's Master of Data Science.
Assistant Professor
Dept of Computational Mathematics, Science and Engineering
Dept of Mathematics
College of Natural Sciences | College of Engineering
Michigan State University
Email | Webpage
Liz Munch received her PhD from the Department of Mathematics at Duke University in May 2013. Prior to joining the faculty of Michigan State University, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University at Albany - SUNY, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota for the 2013-2014 thematic year on applications of topology. She also holds a Master of Arts in Mathematics from Duke University, a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the University of Rochester, and a Bachelor of Music in Harp Performance from the Eastman School of Music.
Professor
Department of Geography, Environment and Spatial Sciences
College of Social Sciences
Michigan State University
Email | Webpage
Julie A. Winkler is a Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State University. Her research interests include synoptic and applied climatology. Recent research has focused on the potential impacts of climate variability and change on agriculture and natural resources. She was the 2013-2014 president of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) and the 2017 recipient of the AAG Ronald F. Abler Distinguished Service Honors. In February 2016, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the AAG Climate Specialty Group. A Fellow of the American Meteorological Society since 2005, she is among the recipients of that organization’s Charles Franklin Brooks Award. She is a 2019 recipient of the William J. Beal Outstanding Faculty Award at Michigan State University.
TBD
Register HERE: http://bit.ly/rlel-wids2019