Congratulations to Wenjing (Clara) Xia!

M.Sc. student, Wenjing (Clara) Xia of the Anderson/Kohn lab was awarded the Mycological Society of America Graduate Research Prize given annually to the two best oral research papers in mycology presented by graduate students, either M.Sc. or Ph.D., at the 84th annual MSA meeting, August 7-11. Over 400 scientists attended the meeting at the University of California, Berkeley. Among the many excellent student presentations, Clara spoke on “Diversity and persistence of genomic variants of the yeast Saccharomyces paradoxus in a natural woodland population.” Clara is using whole genomes to understand populations of this wild yeast, sister species of the domesticated baking, brewing, and wine-making yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The woodland populations are on UTM’s campus and at Riverwood nearby. Using analyses of whole genomes, Clara has found remarkable stability of different clusters of genotypes around individual trees over two years of sampling.

Clara also defended her thesis successfully on September 12, 2016.