Hello! I’m Avalon, and I graduated from UC Davis in Spring 2020 with a B.S. in Global Disease Biology. My academic journey began at Sacramento City College, where I majored in Chemistry with plans to pursue a pre-dental track. However, a summer research internship at the USDA Agricultural Research Service researching Shiga-toxin producing E. coli opened my eyes to the exciting field of agricultural research and how much I loved being in a lab. At UC Davis, I further solidified my interest in research as an undergraduate in Dr. Nitzan Shabek’s lab in Plant Biology. In the Shabek lab, I gained hands-on experience with molecular biology and biochemistry techniques and completed my practicum project focused on the structure-function relationships of protein complexes involved in plant growth signaling pathways.

After graduation, I spent the summer as a viticulture intern at a Sonoma County winery, where I worked grape harvest and scouted vineyards for diseases that I had just learned about the quarter before in PLP 120! I am now in my fourth year of my Ph.D. at Penn State in the Department of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology, where I am studying resistance mechanisms in American elm against Dutch elm disease (another disease I first learned about in PLP 120!). My Ph.D. project has given me the opportunity to collaborate and learn from US Forest Service researchers who have been working on breeding disease-resistant American elms with the hopeful goal of restoring this iconic species after one of the most notorious examples of invasive species impacts. 

Learning with the One Health perspective as a GDB major not only provided me with an integrated view of health and disease but also taught me the value of approaching research questions alongside people with different perspectives and expertise. GDB’s flexible concentration paths allowed me to tailor my coursework to my interests across plant biology, disease ecology, and molecular biology, which provided me a solid foundation for my graduate studies in Plant Pathology! I truly loved every aspect of the GDB experience and am deeply grateful for the students, faculty, advisors, and research mentors who made my experience so great and make the program as a whole so special. Go Ags!