Dr. Vera Velasco won the Mitacs Globalink Research Award

Ve

ra is a postdoctoral fellow at Dr. Ingo Ensminger’s lab and her project is within the Genome Canada funded Large-Scale-Applied-Research Project CoAdapTree (http://coadaptree.forestry.ubc.ca/).   Her project aims to elucidate the molecular mechanisms underlying Douglas-fir adaptation to prolonged and intense drought, heat and heatwave events predicted for future climates.   For this project, she will be identifying important and novel climate-responsive genes in interior and coastal varieties of the conifer Douglas-fir.  She will also be creating a new and more accurate reference transcriptome for Douglas-fir, a challenging feat due to its gigantic genome size of 16 GB! This work will be undertaken in collaboration with the conifer genome expert Dr. Jill Wegrzyn at University of Connecticut.