Fall 2022 NAASC election results
NAASC welcomes Mentewab Ayalew (Spelman College) and Liang Song (University of British Columbia, Vancouver) who were elected to serve a 5-year term on NAASC at this year’s annual NAASC election. They will join the other eight continuing members of the Board of Directors that serve as the Steering Committee for NAASC.
Their candidate statements:
Mentewab Ayalew, Professor, Spelman College, USA
Over the years, I was pleased to engage in many NAASC-organized activities, from attending conferences to contributing to a workshop paper on best practices in plant science outreach to being an assessor for the NAASC ART 21 RCN grant. In doing so, I got the chance to meet my colleagues and members of the community and become familiar with NAASC activities. I now feel it is time to step up my commitment and serve the Arabidopsis community. Below, I will provide an overview of my academic background and interest in serving as a member of NAASC.
In terms of research, I made the discovery that Arabidopsis plants had an antibiotic resistance gene. This discovery raised questions on the mechanism involved and the degree to which plants may be exposed to antibiotics produced by soil bacteria. The mechanism involved appeared distinct from that of bacterial antibiotic resistance genes and challenged me to adopt new approaches that involve modeling and the analysis of Biological Big Data.
As a faculty member at an exclusively undergraduate institution, my research has been an essential vehicle for undergraduate training. I have been particularly intentional about training students to become 21st-century biologists with skills and appreciation for quantitative and computational approaches. This significant effort resulted in grants, publications and involvement in service activities such as becoming a member of the Faculty Advisory Board of the Atlanta University Center Data Science Initiative.
Finally, it has been a privilege to work at the best HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and one of two such institutions in the country dedicated to black women. While my teaching and research have been important vehicles for engaging and challenging students, my service equally contributes to the culture of excellence. Since 2015, I have been the co-director of the LINCS program, a Living and Learning Interdisciplinary Community of STEM scholars aspiring to pursue Ph.Ds. or MD/PhDs. It has been a privilege to provide programming, work with this group of about 20 talented students, and nurture their academic and personal development as black women scientists.
While my institutional context centers black women, I am also appreciative of the many intersectionalities of our students in terms of ability, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, or religion. I actively ensure the inclusion of all, when designing course material, classroom activities, or programming extracurricular events. Beyond teaching, I view the advancement of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) as an integral part of all the activities we undertake in all spheres of our professional lives.
Why NAASC? Serving on the NAASC committee would further connect me to the science and community around Arabidopsis. In the recent past, I have witnessed how audaciously NAASC tackles scientific and societal challenges when visioning collective scientific directions, organizing the community, and convening conferences (e.g., community-organized sessions at ICAR meetings). I genuinely welcome the nomination to serve on this committee and pledge to get deeply engaged in old or new NAASC activities while bringing my wealth of experience and perspective as a faculty at a PUI and HBCU.Liang Song, Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia, Canada
My scientific career has been centered on Arabidopsis since graduate school. During this scientific journey, I’ve received numerous help from members of the community. Serving on NAASC would be one way to give back to the community. I was trained in a flagship university and then a research institute in the States and now have my research group in a large public university in Canada. I hope these experiences will allow me to better understand and pitch to members of different educational backgrounds in both countries.
Hobby-wise, growing anything that has a chloroplast would already entertain me. Scientific-wise, Arabidopsis has many unparalleled advantages. After studying an invasive plant species in college, I switched to Arabidopsis in graduate school because molecular mechanisms fascinate me. The amazing system of Arabidopsis has allowed me to understand gene expression through a broad range of projects, including plant microRNA in graduate school, plant hormones and transcription factor networks during postdoc training, and the interplay between environmental stress and development as a principal investigator.
If you will, I wish to define DEIB in its broadest possible term. Sustainable support should be prioritized to groups that have been historically vulnerable and those who don’t have an extensive support network, such as indigenous people, women, and ethnic or social minorities. Meanwhile, because no one’s life is free of challenges, perhaps the philosophy and empathy inspired by DEIB can be extended to everyone to build a strong and inclusive community. Most of my trainees are female from various cultural backgrounds. I have been testing and exploring effective, and sometimes personalized approaches to help them achieve their career goals.
As a pre-tenured faculty member, I have few experiences in organizing large meetings. However, I am willing to dedicate time and effort to make ICAR 2024 successful. Besides ICAR 2024, one priority would be to maintain the sustainability of the community both financially and talent-wise. It is essential to keep Arabidopsis relevant to funding agencies, other scientific communities, industrial partners, as well as current and future talent pools.
The genetic resources and established stock centers, scientific knowledge and databases, and the feasibility to study Arabidopsis make it a widely accessible system to a very broad community, ranging from well-funded research groups to modest teaching laboratories. I also view Arabidopsis as an important science playground for other plant systems. Because many ground-breaking discoveries have been made, and cutting-edge assays have been established in Arabidopsis, we have strong reasons to believe that Arabidopsis will remain essential to a broader scientific community. The advantage of cost- and time-effective discovery and the potential of knowledge transfer would serve as a basis for the Arabidopsis community to forge partnerships with other plant systems. An additional area that I am interested in is to bridge science, art, and history. This approach is also fun to use in talks and outreach activities.
