Lab news

Spring/Summer 2025

• We had lots of fun interacting with Emily Josephs during her GGA seminar at NC State. Thanks to the Guerrero Lab for hosting!
• Lucas Albano received a Global One Health Postdoctoral Award to mentor undergraduate Cristina Payst through an independent project investigating the evolution of plant-herbivore interactions in our PERSIST common gardens. Congratulations, Lucas!!!
• Lucas gave an EvoGen seminar at NC State. Thanks to Caiti Heil for organizing!
• Kaleb and Lucas were selected to serve on the 2025-2027 Botanical Society of America Early Career Advisory Board. 
• Eve Eddy joined the lab as our newest undergraduate research assistant. Welcome to the lab, Eve!
• Kaleb’s first dissertation chapter has been published in Ecosphere. You can read it here, or listen to Kaleb reading it here!
• Seema had a blast at the Cologne Spring Meeting 2025 on “Plant Ecological Genetics” in Germany. Special thanks to Juliette de Meaux and all the organizers for the invitation, and Elena Hamann for the hospitality and good company! An added bonus was getting to meet up with former NC State colleague Bonnie Blaimer and family afterwards! 
• Kaleb won an NC State CALS Sebastian Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2024 - 2025 as TA for an ecological field-methods survey course, and a CALS Outstanding Scholar Award! Very well-deserved!
• Eve is working as a Summer Botany Field Technician for the Housman Lab at Wichita State University collecting data on the effects of different grazing regimes on plant heterogeneity. Focusing on improving biodiversity for plant, insect, and bird communities on Conservation Reserve Program land by improving management practices. 
• Mataeus Funderburk presented his Honor’s thesis research at the Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium. This work included background, methods, results, and future steps of Mataeus’s research on Venus Flytraps.
• Mataeus will begin his Ph.D. with Kadeem Gilbert in the Department of Plant Biology at Michigan State University in Fall 2025, and was awarded a prestigious 5-year University Distinguished Fellowship. Many congrats, Mataeus!!!
• Seema gave a seminar to the EEOB group at UNC. Thanks to Eric Riddell for hosting! 
• Under the leadership of Annabel, Kaleb, and Cristina, the Sheth lab led an activity about how adaptation and dispersal allow plant populations to cope with climate change at the Reach For the Stars! Be a Star! STEM and Resource Fair for K-12 Students with Disabilities, Family and Friends on the NC State campus. There were over 800 attendees at this event, which is part of the Catalyst Program associated with The Science House at NC State. 
• Catherine Laufenberg completed her Senior Capstone project under the excellent mentorship of Kaleb, and presented her findings in the Plant Biology Undergraduate Research Symposium and the Applied Ecology Undergraduate Research Symposium.
• Catherine Laufenberg received the NC State Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement in Plant Biology from NC State’s Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, and the Richard L. Blanton Honors Capstone Award from NC State’s University Honors Program. Amazing job, Catherine!!!
• Catherine Laufenberg and Mataeus Funderburk graduated. We’ll miss them both, but wishing them all the best in their new chapters!!!
• Catherine Laufenberg began a position as Plant Conservation Technician at the North Carolina Botanical Garden in May!
• Former post-bac technicians Derek Delong and Maggie Evans were accepted to graduate school at Marquette University and will begin in Fall 2025. Congrats to both!
• Lucas and Cristina participated in early-season physiological data collection for the PERSIST project.

Fall 2024

• Annabel Lewis joined as our newest PhD student. We are so excited to have a new student in the lab!
• Many congratulations to Annabel on receiving a prestigious Goodnight Fellowship, a competitive 5-year funding award, along with a Provost’s Doctoral Fellowship and a University Graduate Fellowship!
• Mataeus Funderburk spent the semester studying abroad in Quito, Ecuador. He traveled to several cities and regions of Ecuador, including the Galapagos Islands, Otovalo, Quilotoa, Centro Historico, Cotopaxi, Mindo, Tandayapa, Banos de Agua Santa, and Mitad del Mundo. He also took several art courses, such as ceramics and botanical illustration, met new people, and ate great food.
• With tons of help from collaborators, Lucas and Seema completed fitness data collection for the PERSIST project.
• Seema and Amy Angert kicked off the first year of demographic data collection across the range of scarlet monkeyflower through their joint NSF LTREB grant. Post-bacs Derek Delong and Maggie Evans conducted most of the field work.
• Kaleb received the inaugural GLORIA Great Basin Graduate Research Fellowship, which will provide full support for the remaining two years of his Ph.D. Way to go, Kaleb!
• HUGE congrats to Cristina Payst for being accepted into the inaugural Global One Health Scholars Program!!! This is a prestigious and competitive program (read more about it here) that involves several interdisciplinary opportunities and studying abroad in the Czech Republic this summer.
• Seema gave a seminar at Appalachian State University. Many thanks to Ashley Shaw Adams for hosting!
• Kaleb Goff and Lucas Albano participated in the BSA virtual symposium on Climate Change. You can watch Lucas’s seminar here and Kaleb’s here!

​Spring/Summer 2024

• Robin Bingham, a professor at Western Colorado University funded through an ROA supplement to our NSF PERSIST award, spent her sabbatical with us and completed data collection for an experiment studying evolutionary responses to heat waves in scarlet monkeyflower.
• Seema gave a seminar at the Chicago Botanic Garden through the Graduate Program in Plant Biology and Conservation. Many thanks to Ph.D. students Emma Fetterly and Fernando Rocha Vento for hosting!
• We enjoyed co-hosting Nick Kortessis with the Petry Lab during his PMB seminar at NC State. It’s great to have Nick just down the road from us!
• Lucas Albano joined the lab as a postdoc on the PERSIST project. Welcome, Lucas!
• Congrats to PHD CANDIDATE Kaleb Goff on passing his prelims!
• Undergraduate Sulma Correa presented in the Plant Biology Undergraduate Research Symposium. Excellent job, Sulma!
• Lucas Albano gave a talk at the Evolution meeting in Montreal (Title: Adaptation to biotic and abiotic environmental variation in a cosmopolitan plant)
• Mataeus Funderburk completed data collection for his honor’s thesis research on salinity tolerance in Venus Flytraps in collaboration with Bill Morris, Natalie Kerr, and Aeran Coughlin at Duke University.
• Catherine Laufenberg received a Chilton Undergraduate Research Award from the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at NC State. Nice work, Catherine!
• Cristina Payst participated in a Summer REU program with the Ramirez Lab at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica 
• Lucas participated in early-season physiological data collection for the PERSIST project.

• Sulma Correa graduated, and is now working as a Regulatory Compliance Scientist/ Plant Biologist at Environmental Medicine, Inc. 
• Seema presented findings from the first field season of PERSIST at the virtual American Society of Naturalist’s Vice Presidential Symposium on Quantifying organismal function through time to detect ecological and evolutionary responses to global change. You can watch the talk here.
• Thanks to the exceptional field coordination by Kaleb and the hard work of many volunteers, we contributed to GLORIA Great Basin surveys in Death Valley National Park, Great Basin National Park, and the White Mountains.
• Kaleb and Seema were thrilled to interact with GLORIA Great Basin’s second cohort of Peak Opportunity Fellows in the White Mountains in July.​

*** if you are a former Sheth lab member and have updates to share, please get in touch with Seema. We love hearing from you!!! ***
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