Speaker

Alice Cheung graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts and received her Ph.D. training in the Dept. of Biophysics and Molecular Biology at Yale University. She is currently a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, not far from where she started as a college student.  Her first experience in plant research was as a postdoc at a time when the Agrobacterium Ti plasmid transformation system was emerging. She was supported then by a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship and worked on a collaborative project between the Lawrence Bogorad lab at Harvard and the lab of Professor Marc Van Montagu and Jeff Schell in Belgium, where the Ti plasmid transformative system was being developed. Reproduction in flowering plants and the strategies of male-female interactions have been her main research interests since starting her own lab. Her most recent efforts focus on the regulator receptor kinase FERONIA which controls growth and survival, enabling fertilization, regulating the pistil gating systems to control pollination and mediating growth during plant development and coping mechanisms to survive stresses.

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