Hoang wins poster award
Cornell College senior Nguyet Minh (Julie) Hoang won the Best Poster Award held as part of the Oak Ridge Science Semester.
Hoang, a chemistry major, spent the fall semester at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, working with the Plant-Microbe Interfaces Project, which studies the interactions between microbes and plants. Her poster, “Quantifying Physical Changes in Growing Plant Roots,” won the Best Poster Award at a session that included the other students involved in the Oak Ridge Science Semester, as well as undergraduates studying in another program there.
She worked closely with Mitchel Doktycz, a staff scientist at the laboratory and the laboratory research manager of the Plant-Microbe Interfaces Project. Hoang’s research examined some of the ways microbes affect the health of plants, a process that’s not well understood.
“Some microbes promote plant growth by stimulating root proliferation,” she said. “That fosters plant growth because the roots take up more nutrients and water. One of the factors that affects is cell wall elasticity. Increases in cell wall elasticity are thought to occur through selective wall loosening, but this process remains poorly understood. In this study, I employed Atomic Force Microscopy imaging and force microscopy to study root tips and measure surface elasticity.”
Hoang said she learned an immense amount about not just her research topic, but also interdisciplinary approaches to studying complex biological systems. And working at the Oak Ridge lab was also an amazing experience because of the resources she had access to.
“The lab has amazing resources and facilities, such as the Spallation Neutron Source and High Flux Isotopes Reactor, to study biological systems,” she said. “It’s also home to the world’s second-largest supercomputer, which is named Titan. Titan can run the most complicated algorithms, such as modeling a supernova. Researchers all around the world come in every day to use these facilities, and I am very fortunate to have had a chance to learn about all of them.”
