5/21/2023 0 Comments Memory master sweden![]() After that she went to Sweden for her second M.S., to UC Berkeley for a doctorate in molecular and physiological plant biology, and to Cornell for a postdoctoral fellowship. Ronald graduated from Reed in 1982, then earned her M.S. The institute, in Emeryville, is led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, with UC Davis among the institute’s academic research partners. ![]() She is known for her contributions - with Dave Mackill, adjunct professor of plant sciences - to the isolation of a submergence-tolerance gene that led to the development of flood-tolerant rice varieties now grown by more than 6 million farmers in South and Southeast Asia.īesides her affiliation with the Department of Plant Pathology, she has an appointment at the Genome Center and the federally-funded Joint BioEnergy Institute, which is working on biofuels. Her choice of rice was deliberate - it is one of the most important food crops in the world, and she wanted to help impoverished farmers. Later, while working toward her Ph.D., she studied tomatoes and peppers, and eventually she switched to rice - “always researching how plants and microbes recognize and respond to one another,” she said. Back then, she worked with fungi and trees, studying the microbial connections between them, specifically how fungi contribute to tree health.Īlong the way, she discovered the difficulty of working with pine trees, mainly because they grow so slowly. “My work in his lab enhanced by interest in science,” Ronald said. “And he wrote back! It was so very exciting for me at that age.”Ī few years later, after receiving a master’s degree in biology from Stanford, she applied successfully for a Fulbright fellowship to work with Fries at Uppsala. “I had read his work, and I had written to him to ask about working in his lab,” she said. Ronald was an undergraduate at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, studying mycorrhizal fungi (referring to species that form symbiotic relationships with plants) when she learned of Fries. Fascinated by fungi Ronald: From pine trees, to tomatoes and peppers, to rice - “always researching how plants and microbes recognize and respond to one another.” (UC Davis photo) In October, she will return to Sweden to receive an appointment as an honorary doctor of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, or SLU), more than 30 years after receiving her first degree in Sweden, a Master of Science in physiological botany from Uppsala. Fries was in his 70s at the time - a scientist through and through, whom Ronald remembers as “a very sophisticated, amazing, gentle man.” “My flight had been delayed, so, while he was waiting, he jumped a fence to hunt wild mushrooms,” Ronald said. “My anxiety vanished when I saw a kind-looking man waving a stick with a Boletus edulis stuck on the end of it.” “I was a young student who had just landed at the Stockholm airport, wondering how I was going to recognize my host, Professor Nils Fries,” Ronald said. Pam Ronald, a distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Pathology, has a vivid memory from the day she arrived in Sweden in 1984 to begin a year as a Fulbright Scholar at Uppsala University.
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