Last week, Umeå University decided on three research areas that they will prioritise and fund with SEK 3.5 million each for a period of five years starting in 2024. One of the prioritised areas will be “Plant science for a sustainable green transformation of the Subarctic” which is coordinated by the Department of Plant Physiology at UPSC.
The proposed research area comprises fundamental and applied plant research like it is done at UPSC but also political and economic science approaches, involving nine additional departments or centres from Umeå University. The goal is to “work towards fostering the transition towards a sustainable forestry and food production in the European arctic”.
The selection process for research areas has started in 2022 when the Swedish government proposed to allocate research funding to all higher education institutions based on specific profile areas. Even though the government is not funding this initiative any longer, Umeå University decided to continue the work with the aim to strengthen research quality and competitiveness at the university.
Please find more information in the news from Umeå University
Stefan Jansson is awarded the 2023 Bo and Barbro Hammarström Award at Umeå University for his prominent efforts to promote academic research and development in chemistry, and cell and molecular biology.
Stefan Jansson is professor of plant cell and molecular biology and is one of Scandinavia’s foremost plant researchers and – on top of that – one of Umeå University’s most meritorious and cited researcher. He is even member of three Swedish national royal academies. He has also shouldered a vast administrative responsibility at the University spending a lot of his time on leading research projects and by taking over other academic responsibilities.
How do you feel about receiving this award?
“It feels great, of course. I had just bought a bottle of Cava when I received the surprising news – so that came in handy. Excitingly, what is being rewarded are ‘prominent efforts for the promotion of academic research and development’. Most awards celebrate academic excellence. Excellence is a necessity, but excellence doesn’t always go hand in hand with activities that don’t necessarily favour the acquisition of your own personal research qualifications. If this award encourages researchers to put the team before themself, it also fulfils a higher purpose,” says Stefan Jansson.
He involved all from school groups to senior citizens in popular science activities
In the award motivation, Stefan Jansson is selected as this year’s award recipient thanks to his outstanding ability to reach out with popular science. Not least his project “Höstförsöket” that describes photosynthesis and what happens to leaves in autumn has involved over 11,000 school pupils and has been covered on both national TV, radio and in news papers. Stefan Jansson has been an active participant in political debates, Q&A sessions aimed at young audiences, research events and book fairs aimed at various groups in society such as politicians, senior citizens, representatives from business and industry as well as school classes.
What have you done to reach out with your research to so many?
“Maybe talent is one part of this, but hard work is certainly another. I decided in 2010 when my career was somewhat secured that I would start spending roughly one day per week on bringing research discussion into society. I don’t tend to count hours but estimate that I have probably spent that amount of time over the years,” says Stefan Jansson.
Stefan Jansson has just submitted a new research application, and this award was a helpful addition to his CV.
“Positive feedback is always inspiring, and inspiration is a truly important asset in research,” he says.
The annual award of SEK 100 000 will be presented for five years – between 2023 and 2027 – at the University’s Annual Celebration Ceremony.
Link to the Swedish press release on Umeå University's homepage
Text: Maja Wik (Umeå University)
How, why and for whom should forests be managed? PhD student Isabella Hallberg-Sramek identified these as key questions underlying forest conflicts and expectations on forests in Sweden. Together with local stakeholders and by using different transdisciplinary scientific approaches she worked on identifying practical solutions to adjust forest management strategies to current and future needs. In this interview, she talks about her PhD thesis and highlights the importance to include social and human aspects in forest management planning.
You analysed which expectations are put on the Swedish forests and how they can be addressed with different forest management strategies. What motivated you to work on such a project at the interface between natural and social science and humanities?
My background is in natural sciences. When I started to study forestry at SLU and also started to work during summers in forestry, I realized that a lot of what we were taught was not really what was practiced. Science and practice seemed to be a disconnected. That is when I became interested in the human aspect of forest management. Forest owners but also environmental organisations, Sami people who work with reindeer husbandry, hunters, people that use the forest for recreation and so on – all the different stakeholders are involved in forest management and the relations between them affects management strategies and acceptance.
When we think only from the natural science perspective, we easily forget that forest management is also a human activity. We can only get a complete picture of forest management and understand all dimensions of it when we understand also the social and human aspects. When Annika Nordin, who supervised already my Master thesis, was offering me this PhD project, I was interested from the beginning.
Why do the different expectations that are put today on forests in Sweden lead to conflicts?
Forest management historically and today has been very focussed on quantitative research and mostly on knowledge coming from biology, economy, statistics and ecology. However now, forest management becomes more contested with many different stakeholders and various conflicts related to how to best meet all their different expectations. Partly, these conflicts are related to current management practices but there are also more expectations on forests today than in the past.
In the 18th century, when science-based forest management was initiated, the only focus was on wood production and the question was how to achieve this goal. The conflict by then was between people favouring more continuous cover forestry versus even-aged forest management with clear-cutting.
That conflict still persists but now we have also additional expectations on forests and climate change adds an extra spice to it. There are disagreements on what forest management is supposed to provide in terms of ecosystem services such as climate change mitigation, biodiversity, recreation and wood and on who should benefit from forests and on how to achieve these goals.
What do you consider as the major outcome of your thesis?
I think one main result is that we can learn a lot from practice. We cannot expect science to produce all the knowledge especially with respect to alternative management methods but also need to rely on the local experiences of stakeholders and practitioners. In the project that I was involved in, we really wanted to bring this discussion down to the local level: what expectations are placed on the forests here, now, by whom and what impacts are we expecting from climate change and how can we mitigate them?
We organised forest excursions here in Västerbotten and in Kronoberg in Southern Sweden and invited different stakeholders. These excursions were eye openers for us all because everyone saw and thought of different things even though we all stood on the exact same spot. Exchanging the knowledge helped everyone to understand the other person’s position better and this made it easier to find new solutions and ways for compromises.
The local stakeholders also pointed out that they would like to see more local examples of different managing methods and see what has worked and what not. There are forest owners who are already now practising different methods and we should acknowledge their knowledge and see what we can learn from them.
You combine practical aspects such as talking to local forest stakeholders with machine learning and modelling approaches in your thesis. What was the benefit of combining such different approaches?
First of all, I think it is fun to test new techniques, try new things and new ways of research. For one part of my thesis, we used the Heureka system, that has been developed at SLU. We quantitatively evaluated different forest scenarios by modelling them over a 100-year period. In the next step, we analysed the different scenarios qualitatively in a workshop together with the stakeholders.
It was so interesting to see that the stakeholder brought forward totally different things than came out from the modelling. They were discussing for example the possible outcome of a scenario on the local level, what kind of conflicts it would create between different types of stakeholders and if it would be socially accepted. These aspects were not captured by our models, but it will be very important to implement them in the management planning. Combining these two types of evaluation side-by-side, the quantitative modelling approach and the qualitative one, was therefore a big benefit.
Did anything unexpected came out during your analyses?
For me that avenue to use machine learning was very unexpected, more unexpected than the results itself. We wanted to analyse what type of forest related conflicts are being discussed in the media. There were already analyses of specific conflicts available, mostly analysing what different stakeholders have said. However, we wanted to get a broad overview and understand how big the conflicts are in relation to each other.
To read everything myself and sort it manually would have taken too much time but then we end up using topic modelling. This machine learning approach originates from computer sciences but is now used also in bioinformatics, social sciences and humanities and probably even in more fields. With the help of this tool, we could screen a large number of media articles, identify the main topics and cluster them. Then, we could go deeper into the cluster analysis and check for example if a topic or conflict was discussed differently in different parts of Sweden, how it has differed over time and do more spatial and temporal but also relational analyses of these different types of conflicts.
When venturing out to do this machine learning I was really wondering where that will bring me, but it is a very useful tool that I have now used also when doing literature reviews.
Did you had to overcome any major challenges during your PhD time?
I was working with scientists from history of science and ideas and from political sciences and initially we had these language barriers. Our training and background knowledge was different and we used different references as we came from totally different fields. It took some time to learn to understand each other but also to get to know the main references that the others used and that resurfaced once in a while. I needed to ask stupid questions like just to make sure that we really talk about the same thing. That was a huge challenge in the beginning but now I understand the way they are working and arguing very well. I even managed to set up a new collaboration with a sociologist and a historian of science and ideas, I have not worked together with before, and got them interested to work together with me on one publication.
Your research is very unusual for UPSC where most researcher work with molecular plant biology. Do you think your results can also benefit this type of research?
I think that one main aspect of it is to understand peoples understanding of forests: what techniques are used today and why, how are people thinking about the future, what future do they want. We need to get a more holistic perspective on forests and trees. Widening our perspective to understand better the practical implications of science and also the needs of society can help us to see better how and in which areas science can benefit the current transformation. It took courage to step out of my comfort zone and try something new, but my work has profited a lot from this.
What are you planning to do now?
I will continue as postdoc at SLU and Wageningen University and work with forest owners, their experiences of and their aspirations for the application of alternative practices. It will be close to what I have done during my thesis but more specifically focussing on forest owners. I will be employed at SLU but will be a visiting postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University.
About the public defence
Isabella Hallberg-Sramek, Umeå Plant Science Centre, Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, defends her PhD thesis on Wednesday, 24th of May 2023. Faculty opponent is Professor Georg Winkel, Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, the Netherlands. The thesis was supervised by Annika Nordin from SLU together with Camilla Sandström, Erland Mårald, both from Umeå University, and Eva-Maria Nordström from SLU as assistant supervisors.
Title of the thesis: Tailoring forest management to local socio-ecological contexts - Addressing climate change and local stakeholders’ expectations of forests
Link to the thesis: https://doi.org/10.54612/a.6os9e6ei21
More Information about Isabella Hallberg-Sramek's research:
In March 2022, Isabella Hallberg-Sramek was awarded with the “Svenska Humanistiska Förbundets pris”, a prize for a young person who has carried out commendable intellectual work in the spirit of humanism. In connection with the prize, another interview with her was published. Find the interview here on the SLU homepage (only in Swedish)
More about the project “Bring down the sky to the earth” that Isabella Hallberg-Sramek was involved in on the homepage of Umeå University
News about Isabella Hallberg-Sramek’s article in which she evaluates the different forest management scenarios using the Heureka System for modelling and the qualitative evaluation by the local stakeholders (only in Swedish)
More about the Heureka System, a software developed at SLU that Isabella Hallberg-Sramek used to evaluate different forest management scenarios via modelling
For more information, please contact:
Isabella Hallberg-Sramek
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Email:
https://www.slu.se/en/ew-cv/isabella-hallberg-sramek/
On June 1 and 2, UPSC is arranging the UPSC Symposium for Early Career Plant Scientists. The main organizers of the symposium are Stéphane Verger and Petra Marhava, two young group leaders at UPSC. We have asked them about their motivation to organise this event, why they specifically address Early Career Researchers and what UPSC as a workplace is offering to young researchers.
You two are organizing the UPSC Symposium for Early Career Plant Scientists. What is the purpose of this symposium?
Our main goal is to attract very good young researchers to join UPSC as postdocs. UPSC is a great place to work and Umeå is a wonderful and very safe city to live in, but the fact that it is so far north often seems to discourage candidates to apply for positions here. They may be scared of the cold climate and the short days during winter. Inviting young talented researchers to come and present their research here in Umeå allows us to show them UPSC, Umeå and its surroundings, and hopefully convince them that Umeå is actually a great place to work and live.
This concept is nothing that we invented. Similar events are being organized in many other places, and they have also been organized in the past at UPSC. Very good young researchers came to UPSC as a result of them and these researchers have contributed very positively to the research at UPSC and to UPSC in general.
Why are you addressing specifically Early Career Researchers?
The idea behind this initiative is to select strong “early career researchers” for the symposium that have high chances to be successful in applications for postdoctoral fellowships such as those offered by Marie Curie, EMBO and HFSP. These are prestigious fellowships for the candidate and the institute, but we know that it is extremely competitive to get one. We will do our best to have a backup solution in case the applications of the candidates are not successful. There are all the time new postdoc opportunities opening at UPSC thanks to fundings obtained by individual PIs, and those strong candidates could be perfect fits for one of these opportunities.
What is the benefit for the applying candidates?
We think it is a great opportunity for those young talented researchers, who are finishing their PhD or have recently finished, to present their work in an international context. They can meet several PIs and other researchers, discuss their research with them and expand their research network. Moreover, UPSC will cover all expenses for the invited candidates.
What do you think should one think of when choosing a postdoctoral project?
The topic and/or approaches should appear to be significantly different from the PhD work but not too far away, so that you can still justify some sort of coherence in your career. It could also be a major disciplinary change especially if your PhD expertise can bring something new or useful to a different subject or model that you are targeting in your postdoctoral project. Generally, it is important to show that you have thought well and chosen your project (and research group) because it makes sense for you and your career plan. It is better than just taking up any open postdoc position that was available and that you got offered because you weren’t sure what to do after your PhD.
The project should be of course novel and appear generally exciting to the research community, but a key point is also to choose a team and supervisor that you feel comfortable with and that could give you the opportunities that you will need for your future career.
Why do you think UPSC is a good place for an Early Career Plant Scientist?
At UPSC, we have about 30 research groups with strong international reputation that cover a broad range of plant research areas and model organisms and collaborate a lot internally. The institute is also impressively well equipped with different shared platforms and facilities available for all kind of plant research and they are well connected to other facilities on the national level. It is an excellent environment for learning new techniques and acquiring new skills.
UPSC is a very international workplace with more than 40 different nationalities. Out of about 200 researchers, there are more than 100 postdocs and PhD students. It is a very nice, supportive, and stimulating community of young researcher to interact with. They are also very active in organising social activities outside of the working hours like for example cycling, skiing or playing “Innebandy”, a kind of floor hockey that is very popular in Sweden. Even though you might think Umeå is “at the end of the world”, you will see there are many fun things to do.
What do you like most about working at UPSC?
As a PI, it is really great that so many of the resources are shared within UPSC. When new people join our groups, we don’t have to struggle to find equipment that we need for their project or to get the help or training for some specific technique they would like to use. The personnel on the platforms provide excellent support for that.
An advantage is also that we have large open space labs where people from different teams are mixed. Like this you get in contact with people from other groups easily. People collaborate and share openly and it is easy to learn about or be trained for a new technique by a colleague from a different team. We and our group members appreciate this a lot!
More information about the UPSC Early Career Plant Scientist Symposium
Deadline for application: April 15, 2023
Contact
Petra Marhava
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Email:
https://www.upsc.se/petra_marhava
Stéphane Verger
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Plant Physiology
Umeå University
Email:
https://www.upsc.se/stephane_verger
Torgny Näsholm’s research on amino acids as nitrogen source for plants revolutionised the understanding of plant nutrition. His results led to the development of novel and environmentally friendly nitrogen bio stimulants which are now commercialized by the company Arevo - a development that was last week awarded with the 2023 University spin-off prize at Umeågalan.
Torgny Näsholm initiated his research on nitrogen nutrition while working at the Department of Forest Genetics and Plant Physiology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) that is part of UPSC. He is now Professor in Tree Ecophysiology at the SLU Department of Forest Ecology and Management but still collaborates closely with the UPSC research groups as an associated group leader.
His ground-breaking discovery, published in Nature 1998, was that trees can take up amino acids directly and that this is the preferred nitrogen source in boreal forests rather than ammonium or nitrate. This discovery changed the understanding of plant nutrition and led to the development of new types of nitrogen bio stimulants based on the amino acid arginine.
These bio stimulants have not only a positive effect on plant growth and stress resistance - they also reduce the leakage of nitrogen into the ground water. This is helps to decrease the environmental impact of nitrogen fertilisation, a point that was highlighted in the motivation for the University spin-off prize that was handed over on Wednesday last week at Umeågalan.
Several patents based on Torgny Näsholm’s research were originally filed and granted to the UPSC spin-off company SweTree Technologies that specialized this development in the daughter company SweTree Nutrition. The inventions are now developed and commercialized by new investors in the company Arevo.
Umeågalan is arranged by Umeå Municipality and Umeå University together with Umeå University Holding, SLU Holding and Umeå’s business community. The idea behind is to stimulate new collaborations and to contribute to make Umeå an attractive place for doing business. Eleven awards in different categories were handed out this year during the event on March 23 to companies located in the Umeå region.
Last week, the third INUPRAG Symposium on Integrative Plant Biology took place at Hotel Mimer in Umeå. Researchers from the three partners of the INUPRAG cooperation - from the French INRAE, from UPSC and from the Spanish research centre CRAG - were meeting for the third time, presented their recent work, exchanged ideas and planted seeds for new research collaborations.
Enhancing networking and stimulating collaborative research projects – this is the goal of the INUPRAG cooperation. INUPRAG stands for INRAE, the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment, UPSC and CRAG, the Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics, located in Barcelona, Spain. All three institutes are strong research environments in plant sciences and the symposium last week was the third trilateral meeting since the start of the cooperation in 2015.
“Originally, we planned the symposium in Umeå for 2020 but had to postpone it because of the Covid-19 pandemic. We were pleasantly surprised by the high interest”, says Catherine Bellini, professor at Umeå University and Senior Scientist at INRAE, who was the main organiser of the symposium. “We expected that some of the speakers we invited will not have time to come but everyone said yes from the beginning. In the end, we had a very dense programme and about 140 instead of the 100 participants initially expected.”
Thirty-five high quality talks by group leaders and 36 posters mainly from PhD students and postdocs were presented during the two-and-a-half-day symposium. In addition to the multidisciplinary presentations two round table discussions were organised about the European Horizon Europe programme and ways to further enhance networking within the INUPRAG cooperation.
Promoting the training of young scientists and facilitating knowledge transfer
“One objective of the cooperation is to promote the training of young scientists through lab exchanges between the partners and by enabling them to develop their networks”, explains Catherine Bellini. “We had six joint postdoctoral projects ongoing in 2020. Most of the postdocs have already moved on and could thus not present their research during this year’s symposium but we still think this is a good concept.”
The other major goal of the cooperation is to facilitate the transfer of knowledge and tools that are developed on model species like Arabidopsis and Poplar to crops and trees through joint research projects. The organisers of the symposium kept the afternoon of the second day free to give the participants time to meet and discuss potential future collaborations and offered a tour of the UPSC facilities.
“It is always useful to visit other institutes and see what type of analyses can be done when planning research collaborations”, states Catherine Bellini who guided a group around UPSC. “We also learn a lot by exchanging experiences on how different facilities are managed at different institutes. It was fun to show our French and Spanish colleagues around and we are glad that they found it interesting. We are now looking forward for the next INUPRAG meeting which will be in France in 2025.”
The first meeting of the INUPRAG cooperation took place in Nancy, France, in 2015 when the first official agreement was signed. It was followed by a second meeting in Barcelona in 2018. That year, six postdoctoral fellowships were granted by the Kempestiftelserna, and the six postdocs started their collaborative research projects by the end of 2018/beginning of 2019. Since its start, about 100 co-publications have been published within the frame of the INUPRAG cooperation.
More information about the INUPRAG Cooperation
For questions regarding the INUPRAG cooperation, please contact:
Catherine Bellini
Professor
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Plant Physiology
Umeå University
& Senior Scientist at INRAE
Empowering female scientists to achieve gender equality – this is the purpose of the International Day for Women and Girls in Science which is celebrated tomorrow on the 11th of February. We have asked our most recent female group leader, Petra Marhava, about her career, how she balances work and family life and what she thinks is important to improve gender balance in science.
What made you become interested in science?
Petra Marhava: Science is all about asking questions and seeking answers; my curiosity about the unknown motivates my passion in science. My PhD with Prof. Friml in Belgium sparked my interest in plant cell biology, and when I continued as a postdoc with Prof. Hardtke in Switzerland, it confirmed that this is what I want to pursue in the future. Few things are more rewarding than working in a career that is both enjoyable and beneficial to others.
Do you remember a key moment that influenced your decision to become a scientist?
Petra Marhava: After completing my MSc in Molecular Biology, I began working as a cytogeneticist at the Department of Oncology Genetics at the National Cancer Institute in Slovak Republic, which was a good experience but more of a normal job, and I missed doing research. The opportunity to begin my PhD in Prof. Friml's lab was very appealing to me because it was a completely new field for me. This step was a key moment for me but also my long interest in science and the impact of my mentors were very important.
What has helped you to move on with your academic career?
Petra Marhava: It was definitely my mentors (Christian and Jiri) and the locations where I studied my PhD or conducted postdoctoral research. I started my PhD in Plant Systems Biology at VIB in Ghent, where I was surrounded by approximately 300 excellent plant researchers, finished my PhD at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria, which provides scientific diversity, and continued a postdoc at University of Lausanne, one of the best places to undertake plant research in Switzerland. These were definitely the key factors that influenced my career. Last but not least, our department gave a trust in me and supported my applications to establish my own research group here at UPSC.
You are a mother of three kids and just start to set up your independent research group at UPSC. How does it work to balance work and family live?
Petra Marhava: Being a mother of three little children while establishing my own research career is challenging and demands many sacrifices. But I am fortunate to have an amazing husband, who helps and supports me much, making things simpler. Moreover, I have a great support from our department and fantastic colleagues around me.
What do you think can we do to inspire girls and young women in science and motivate them to start a career in science?
Petra Marhava: I don’t think that we need to motivate/inspire girls or young women to start a career in science. They are inspired! In my opinion, we should think about how to motivate them to stay in science. Childcare and dual career support are only few examples how we can support them.
Do you have any tips for young (female) researchers who want to start a career in science?
Petra Marhava: It's difficult for me to give advice, but one thing that has helped me in the past is to never give up (and I wanted many times 😊).
About Petra Marhava
Petra Marhava started her independent research group at UPSC in summer 2022 focussing on plant acclimation to heat and cold stress. After her master’s degree in Molecular Biology, Petra Marhava worked as cytogeneticist at the National Cancer Institute of Slovak Republic. She did her PhD in Jiří Friml’s group that moved from the VIB U-Ghent in Belgium to the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Vienna and finished her PhD there in 2015. Then, she moved on to a postdoc in Christian Hardtke’s group at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland before she joined UPSC in 2020.
In 2022, Petra Marhava received one of the highly competitive ERC Starting Grants from the European Research Council (ERC) and was awarded with a prize for young researchers from Kungliga Skytteanska Samfundet. Petra Marhava was finalist of the 2020 New Phytologist Tansley Medal for excellence in plant science and received in November 2021 a starting grant from the Swedish Research Council.
More information about Petra Marhava’s research
More information about Petra Marhava’s ERC Starting Grant project "Hot-and-Cold"
Martí Quevedo, postdoc in Åsa Strand’s group, is granted a two-year postdoctoral fellowship from the AGenT postdoctoral programme at the Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics in Barcelona (CRAG). This multidisciplinary and intersectoral programme is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie COFUND Programme and very competitive. Martí Quevedo will start his new, independently developed project on chromatin architecture beginning of next year.
What was motivating you to apply for this competitive fellowship?
"This fellowship really felt like stars aligning. This call offers funding for post-docs to pursue your own independent projects and aims to be a bridge towards starting your own group in the short future. All of this at CRAG in Barcelona, an excellent plant research institute near my hometown. In order to pursue a career in academia I needed to move to a new lab after 4 years at UPSC. So, I was extra motivated for this application."
How did you choose your future lab and with whom will you work?
"I first went through several PIs at CRAG that interested me and reached out to meet them online before the application. I found this call extremely helpful not only to select the group that interested me, but also for networking. Finally, I decided to join Elena Monte’s group. Besides sharing a similar background in chloroplast and light signalling, what really attracted me about her group is the range of plant model systems they are working with, ranging from the green algae Chlamydomonas to Arabidopsis and rice."
What do you plan to do in your project?
"Similarly as I did at UPSC, I will focus on establishing new methods to study how plants modulate their DNA. Continuing with my background in transcription regulation I will study how plants cope with stress at the nuclear level. In detail, I am interested in how the architecture of the chromatin changes and how the 3D conformation of the DNA could be engineered to improve crop traits in the long run."
Do you think your experiences from your time at UPSC will benefit your future project?
"Absolutely, coming from a PhD in Medical Genetics, my stay at UPSC has had an enormous impact on my career, starting with the drastic change to study plants. In Åsa Strand’s lab I had the freedom and funding to establish new lines of research related to my experience in epigenetics while assimilating their deep knowledge in plant physiology. Moreover, thanks to the rich post-doc community at UPSC, I met colleagues (and friends) that were experts in a vast range of topics and methodologies. Last but not least, the exceptional team at the UPSC bioinformatics facility significantly elevated my data analysis skills. All of this will benefit developing my future project."
Which were the biggest challenges writing your proposal?
"Mostly time! As most post-docs, that are also parents, know, it is especially hard to juggle around to find free time in your day-to-day schedule. Writing a proposal while keeping up at the lab and at home is always demanding. Another challenge was to come up with a new line of research that is innovative enough to get attention but still feasible to do in the context of the host group. For that, experience from previous (failed) applications helped a lot, as ideas become more mature when you chew on them for a while."
Do you have some tips for other postdocs or PhD students applying for similar competitive fellowships that are funded by the European Union?
"Every situation is different, and I am not an expert to be giving advice. In fact, I reached out to other colleagues and PIs for advice and even fished for past successful applications to learn from them. It is normal to fail most of the time. I tried many applications even if I believed I had little chance. That helped me to develop my writing skills and to have a backbone proposal ready to reformat for every new application."
Do you think you will miss UPSC and Umeå and if yes, what do you think you will miss most?
"After almost 5 years at UPSC and in Umeå I will miss a lot of things from here. From Umeå, I will be missing the tranquillity and easy-going life. Raising a child was less stressful here for sure! On that site, it may sound simple, but having such a gorgeous sport centre so close to work has made resisting those dark months of winter a bit easier. Also learning a bit of Swedish folk music and playing at UmeFolk was an amazing experience. From Northern Sweden, I will miss the outdoors. Skiing, fishing and hiking were marvellous in the boreal forest. Oh and of course Västerbotten cheese!"
"At the personal level, being a post-doc in a foreign country makes you in a constant state of loss, as friends you make from work are coming and going constantly. So, I have been missing friends from the first year I was here, and I will be missing friends when I am gone. I hope that many of the bonds I have made during this journey up North remain strong."
For more information, please contact:
Martí Quevedo
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department Plant Physiology
Umeå University
Sweden
Email:
Twitter: @marti_qc
Today, Sara Raggi, postdoc in Stéphanie Robert’s group, was awarded with the UPSC Agrisera Prize 2022. She is acknowledged for her significant scientific contributions to plant cell and developmental research and her commitment to create a positive and collaborative work environment at UPSC. The prize was handed over during the traditional UPSC Christmas lunch by Rishikesh Bhalerao, vice-chairmen of the UPSC Board, and Joanna Porankiewicz-Asplund from Agrisera.
Sara Raggi started to work as postdoc in Stéphanie Robert’s group at UPSC in 2016 after finishing her PhD. She was involved in several scientific projects and is co-author of several articles. One of her main projects was to develop an automated method to measure the angle of unbending Arabidopsis seedlings after germination. This method uses machine learning as basis for the image analysis and was done together with an engineering master student who Sara supervised. Two publications from this project are currently in preparation.
Besides her scientific achievements, Sara Raggi has been actively engaged in improving the work environment at UPSC. She was postdoc representative, member of the greenhouse introduction team and helped with outreach events. She took over responsibilities in different groups at UPSC, like for example the gardening group which set up boxes to grow vegetables in front of UPSC and the “Greener UPSC” group that aims on promoting sustainability at UPSC, and helped to organize social events.
The UPSC Board received this year eleven nomination letters for seven candidates. The selection of Sara was based on the letters nominating Sara Raggi which emphasized Sara Raggi’s teamwork skills, her scientific excellence and her contribution to making UPSC a great place to work. Every year anyone working at UPSC can nominate a colleague for the prize, a travel voucher sponsored by Agrisera. Based on the written nomination the members of the UPSC board voted to select the recipient of the prize.
“The prize gives us the opportunity to thank our personnel for their work and commitment. It is always very difficult to choose between the candidates as they all highly deserve of this prize,” says Rishikesh Bhalerao who announced the winner of the prize this year.
Last Friday, Göran Ericsson, Dean of the Faculty of Forest Sciences from SLU, and Mikael Elofsson, Dean of the Faculty of Science and Technology from Umeå University, inaugurated the new growth facility at Umeå Plant Science Centre. This extension of the current facility was needed to meet the increasing demand for controlled plant growth conditions and is highly appreciated by the researchers.
Since its inception more than twenty years ago, Umeå Plant Science Centre (UPSC) has grown massively, hosting currently more than thirty research groups and about 200 people. The demand for controlled plant growth conditions increased constantly during this time and will likely grow further with additional group leaders set to join in 2023. The usage of the available growing space was continuously optimised but could not meet the demand anymore so that the UPSC board decided in 2019 to extend the current growth facility.
"The best solution was to reconstruct an entire floor"
“We considered different possibilities, but in the end, the best solution was to reconstruct an entire floor to make space for the new growth facility,” explains Johannes Hanson, coordinator of the rebuilding project. “When thinking on growth facilities you might expect a greenhouse, but we will only have growth cabinets in the new facility. They need less space than our current growth rooms so that we can use the available space more economically and we can also offer more versatile growth conditions that can be individually adjusted to the needs.”
Space for more than forty growth cabinets
The new growth facility will have space for more than forty growth cabinets. Several were already available at UPSC. They have been now all moved to the new facility and additional cabinets are in the purchase process. Such cabinets allow to control very precisely temperature, carbon dioxide levels, light intensity and humidity - factors that are strongly affecting plant growth. An additional factor is light quality which has a strong effect on photosynthesis but also on many other processes in plants.
“Four of the new cabinets will allow researchers to investigate the impact of specific wavelengths of light on plant growth, a research topic of great interest to several research groups at UPSC. We had similar cabinets before, but they are getting old and need replacement”, says Rishikesh Bhalerao, manager of the UPSC Plant Growth Facility. “Thanks to Kempestiftelserna we can now purchase eleven new cabinets that can be used for growing Arabidopsis and small tree saplings.”
"Controlled plant growth conditions are very crucial for our research"
Researchers at UPSC are working mainly with model plants: the annual plant thale cress or Arabidopsis, poplar and aspen and spruce. The cabinets are located in a contained area which is the prerequisite for working with flowering transgenic plants. This area comprises also space for planting and lab work, a photo station and two stereomicroscopes so that the plants growing in the new facility can be examined in more detail.
“We want to offer our researchers the best possible environment and controlled plant growth conditions are very crucial for our research,” says Stefan Jansson, head of the Department of Plant Physiology at Umeå University which is one of the two sister departments of UPSC. “We were lucky that we had room in the budget of our department to fund the reconstruction and it is relieving that we can now reduce some of the pressure, especially for growing Arabidopsis. The next step needed will be to get more and better space for growing trees, especially for poplar.”
For questions regarding the new growth facility, please contact:
Johannes Hanson
Umeå Plant Science Centre
Department of Plant Physiology
Umeå University