International start-up seminar by PhD student, Zhiwei Song

As enrolled in the PhD School of SCIENCE, UCPH, students have two mandatory seminars during their enrolment, i) the start-up seminar which is supposed to be given three months into the study and ii) the status seminar which should be held when the student is mid-way into the enrolment period of 3 years.

Song gave his start-up seminar Friday the 26^th February and we had invited three special guests to take part in order to benefit from their vast experience within the topic. From CEAF in Chile, Dr Guillermo Toro took part – Guillermo has a background in both flood and drought tolerance and works with breeding. Lukasz Kotula of UWA in Western Australia also joined and he has proven track record within the functional properties of the root barrier to radial oxygen loss and also salinity tolerance of crops. Finally, Juan Jeménez of Nagoya University in Japan also took part and he is currently also working with the properties of the barrier to radial oxygen loss in rice at Prof Nakazono’s lab in Nagoya. Moreover, Dr Chen Lin and Dr Dennis Konnerup spent time with us and provided useful feedback.

Unfortunately, Song was sick with Covid-19 and I believe that everybody was impressed with his performance considering that he was really not feeling well at his quarantine hotel room.

The seminar will, nevertheless, prove extremely useful of us as we are heading into a research topic which is completely new to us – drought! However, with the help of these competent colleagues I am confident that Elisa and I will be able to supervise Song so that he ends up with a PhD that greatly contributes to the topic.