BSPP Plant Health Club: Mentoring Inexperienced Researchers

Gail Preston and David Studholme will lead a workshop that will provide advice for researchers who are involved in mentoring inexperienced researchers, such as students involved in summer research internships, honours research projects or masters projects. It is particularly targeted towards postdoctoral researchers, graduate students and other research staff who are involved in the day-to-day supervision and mentoring of inexperienced researchers. We will discuss various aspects of mentoring for students involved in diverse types of research.

• Planning

• Training approaches

• Time-management

• Giving feedback

• Self-evaluation

• Inclusive mentoring of students from diverse backgrounds

BSPP Chair: Gail Preston, BSPP Vice President

Co-chair: Katia Hougaard, Imperial College London

Meetings are recorded and are available for BSPP Members here

Prof. Gail Preston (Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford)

Prof. Gail Preston is a Lecturer in Plant-Microbe Interactions, Director of the BBSRC-funded Oxford Interdisciplinary Bioscience Doctoral Training Partnership at the University of Oxford and Deputy Director of the University of Oxford’s Doctoral Training Centre. https://preston.web.ox.ac.uk/

She developed a fascination for plant pathology while studying Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge. She studied for her doctorate under the inspiring mentorship of Prof. Alan Collmer at Cornell University, where she began to ask questions about the biology of plant pathogens that still inform her research today. How do environmental factors regulate pathogenicity and virulence mechanisms? How do pathogens manipulate the microenvironment inside host tissues? How does the environment inside and outside plants affect disease development?

She returned to the UK to study microbial gene function in the plant environment and in 2001 she was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship. She now divides her time between interdisciplinary research into molecular plant-microbe interactions and supporting the career development of early career researchers.

Prof. David Studholme, Biosciences, University of Exeter.

My research is focussed on genomics of a range of pathogens including Xanthomonas spp. (with Murray Grant at Warwick and Joana Vicente at Fera) and downy mildew (with Mahmut Tor). My PhD and early postdoctoral work involved laboratory-based molecular microbiology but in the early 2000s I switched to computational biology, as a member of the Pfam database team at the Sanger Institute and subsequently leading the bioinformatics team at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich. Since late 2009 I have been  at the University of Exeter where I am currently Associate Professor in Bioinformatics. Through this journey, I have supervised numerous undergraduate students and inexperienced researchers.

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Read more about the BSPP Plant Health Club here.

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