Meet Connor Purvis Winner of the 2025 Teidje award)
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EmailCongratulations Connor Purvis (PhD Burns lab), who will use his award to travel to an international meeting.
"l be presenting findings at the International Symposium on Microbial Ecology in Auckland, NZ, in August 2026, from my greenhouse study on plant-soil feedback in johnsongrass. This experiment first started in the Fall of 2023, beginning with the design of pots to grow johnsongrass for over a year in the greenhouse to study plant-soil feedback. Nearly two years later, all greenhouse data collection and harvest are complete! This study aims to examine how different johnsongrass biotypes condition the soil and influence the growth of subsequent johnsongrass plants. To understand the changes in soil microbial community structure, we collected soil samples before conditioning, after conditioning, and following the feedback phase. The next phase will be to extract the DNA from all the soil samples! A key goal of this project is to identify microbes that could be leveraged for sustainable weed suppression."
