Meet the 2025 PSM Fellowship Awards
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Email"Fellowship opportunities like this play a crucial role in helping students gain exposure to conferences, courses, and workshops. “I am thankful for the opportunities that allow students to grow as scientists.”
🌱 2025 PSM Graduate Student Award Spotlight
This week: Maria Camila Buitrago Acosta (Dr. Rachel Naegele's lab)
Receives Thompson Endowment forHer Work in Plant–Pathogen Interactions
Maria’s passion for understanding how plants and pathogens interact, and how plants can adapt to their environment was recently recognized with the Norman R. and Jessie A. Thompson Endowment in Crop and Soil Sciences.
Originally from Bogotá, Colombia, Maria completed her undergraduate degree in Microbiology and a master’s in Biological Sciences and Computational Biology at the Universidad de los Andes. She first came to MSU as a visiting scholar in Dr. Mary Hausbeck’s lab, where she worked with Botrytis and Fusarium. “After a year and a half, I started my PhD with Dr. Rachel Naegele, working with sugar beets and Hablitzia tamnoides, a relative of beets,” she explains.
Maria chose to continue her academic path at MSU because of the strong faculty, excellent research facilities, and the welcoming culture. Her current work focuses on generating new genetic resources for beet improvement, with special attention to two key traits: cold tolerance and disease susceptibility during storage. “The goal is that this knowledge could be used for the improvement of sugar beet genotypes. Understanding the details of how life works drives my curiosity as a scientist, and I am passionate about how we can apply this knowledge to improve crops.”
Ultimately, Maria hopes to work with a collaborative research team to develop new crops that improve quality of life for communities around the world. Toward this goal, she attended Plant Biology 2025 in Milwaukee, a major international conference organized by the American Society of Plant Biologists, with the support of the award. “The talks and workshops were highly relevant to my current work, and I had the opportunity to connect with researchers from other universities and industry. This was the largest conference I’ve attended so far, and I’m grateful for the experience.”
Maria adds that fellowship opportunities like this play a crucial role in helping students gain exposure to conferences, courses, and workshops. “I am thankful for the opportunities that allow students to grow as scientists.”
See All other PSM 2025 fellowship awardee profiles here:
- Connor Purvis Winner of the 2025 Teidje award
- Ashlynn Morin: Advancing Long-Term Agricultural Microbiome Science
- PBGB grad student Marysia Zaleski-Cox wins Rossman and Thompson fellowship awards
- PBGB grad student Asmaa Morsi wins Rossman and Thompson fellowship awards
- Congratulations 2025 PBGB award winner and PSM PhD Candidate John Hawkins
- Tomas Lopes receives Carter Harrison Endowment and the Rossman Scholarship
- Qinyuan Cao receives Kirk & Marjorie Lawton fellowship award
