Event Date
Emily Bellis, Computational Biology Lead, Avalo, presents "Understanding crop landrace evolution to accelerate breeding for current and future environments"
Dr. Bellis earned a B.S. in Genetics and Biochemistry at Texas A&M University in 2010 and a Ph.D. in Integrative Biology in 2017 from Oregon State University. She began working in plant systems as an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Penn State, where her research focused on spatial coevolutionary genomics of cereal-parasitic plant interactions. In 2019, she returned to her home state of Arkansas and was an Assistant Professor of Bioinformatics at Arkansas State University until May 2023. At A-State, she also served as Associate Director of the Center for No-Boundary Thinking leading several initiatives in interdisciplinary data science research and education as Director of Student Engagement for AI-Campus and as co-PI of an NSF Research Traineeship Program UandI-DEECoDE. In May 2023, she began a new role as Computational Biology Lead at Avalo where she continues to promote feedback among machine learning, evolutionary genomics, spatial ecology, and plant and data science, towards more resilient and sustainable food systems.
Host: Mary Francis LaPorte (mflaporte@ucdavis.edu)