2026 April
Oh my goodness the lab is swamped with good news these few weeks!!
Minya is teaching IB 103 Intro to Plant Biology and was interviewed by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and the Siebel Center of Design, because she redesigned the course and established a collaboration with the design center that allows students to do a final art/alternative medium project with complete creative freedom.
Angelique was awarded The Block Grant from the Graduate College that will cover her entire summer funding, as well as the Harold C. & Sonja L. Research Award from the School of Integrative Biology and the Bill Dhal Graduate Student Research Award from the Botanical Society of America that will cover part of her research funding.
Sam was selected to be the Illinois Summer Research Program (ISRP) Research Team Leader in the Access and Engagement Office in the Graduate College for the summer.
Our incoming PhD student Jonathan Chai just received the NSF GRFP as well!
And the whole lab is gearing up to attend our beloved Botany2026 at Tucson together. It has been a veryyyyy busy but exciting and productive semester!
2026 April - New lab photos just dropped!
2026 March
Congratulations to Angelique for winning the ROOT & SHOOT travel grant which will provide $3000 for her AND Minya to attend the Botany2026 conference this summer!!!!
2026 Feb - SLAYYYYYYYY
Sam and Angelique presented in multiple symposium this month and killed it every time!!!
2026 Jan -
Happy New Year!! Let’s hope for a year of exciting science from the Min lab! We are grateful for Yudi for taking care of our plants during the Christmas break, and now our greenhouse rooms is exploding with plants! Also we got the exciting news that Angelique was awarded the ASPB Recognition Travel Award that will provide a "full ride" fellowship to attend ASPB's annual meeting in Ottawa, Canada, this year - Congratulations Angelique!!!
2025 Nov -
We had fun bowling with our friends from Marks & Punyasena & McGrath labs! We also discovered that our undergrad Emma is actually a bowling genus, who literally carried the team - a third of our total score was done by Emma lol! Also shout out to Yudi, who did bowling for the first time in her life, yet managed to throw out a high speed curve ball (thanks to a youtube tutorial on site??).
2025 Sept -
First experiment - check!
First sowing - check!
First lab meeting - check!
First lab photo - check!
Our starter pack is also assembled:
left to right- Emma, Sam, Minya, Yudi, Angelique
2025 July -
Minya came back from one of her fav conferences, Botany2025, which was in Palm Spring CA this year. She co-hosted a workshop “Design Principles for Figure Making” with Dr. Kasey Pham, co-hosted a Listening Session as a member of the Early Career Professional Development Committee, judged talks as a member of the Katherine Esau Award Committee (she was a Esau Award recipient in 2018 too!), served as a panelist on the Belonging in Botany session, learned a lot of cool science, caught up with long time friends and colleagues and made new ones, enjoyed the pool and California sunshine, aaaaaaaaaand also caught Covid. (I guess this was a relatively eventful conference lol)
2025 July -
Congratulations to Sam on finishing the 8-week fully funded Summer Predoctoral Program AND winning 3rd place Graduate Research Talk at the Illinois Summer Research Symposium!
2025 June -
Full lab renovation almost done!!!! Let the magic BEGIN.