Jennifer Blake-Mahmud won the Best Oral Paper in the Physiology Section at the Botany 2017 conference

This year, at Botany 2017, Ecology and Evolution PhD candidate, Jennifer Blake-Mahmud, gave a talk titled "Sugars, stress, and sex-change: environmental sex determination in striped maple" from her work in Dr. Lena Struwe's lab.

The presentation described her work in New Jersey forests focusing on sexual plasticity in maple trees. Sexual plasticity is a rare in flowering plants, but her study species, the striped maple (pictured below) is one of these rare species.  Jennifer's work has discovered that the most severely damaged trees tend to switch to female sex expression, and female trees tend to experience increased mortality.

Additional details on Jennifer's work can be found here.

Congrats, Jennifer!

Acer pensylvanicum (Sapindaceae)