Travel Award Recipients

Virginia Lis Barrera, Rosario, Argentina
Meet Virginia Lis Barrera, the 2024 PCA Travel Award recipient. Virginia obtained a Master’s degree in Biotechnology in 2019 and is now a fourth year Ph.D. student in the Biological Sciences program at the National University of Rosario. Virginia is currently studying the mechanisms that determine cell number, size, and ploidy during postembryonic plant development using Arabidopsis thaliana as a model organism, aiming to identify new regulators and understand the interactions between these pathways. The main goal of Virginia’s thesis is to determine the role of endoreplication in these processes and its consequences. Virginia’s PCA Travel Award will provide full support to attend the 2025 Gordon Research Conference in Portland, Maine.

Oluwatoyosi Adaramodu
Oluwatoyosi Adaramodu, also known as Lisa, is a first-year PhD student in Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a strong background in plant science, starting with her Bachelor’s degree in Plant Science and Biotechnology at Federal University Oye Ekiti (FUOYE) in Nigeria where she studied sunflower adaptation to the rainforest zone. She then went on to complete a three-year Master’s research position at the Institute of Botany, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (IBCAS), where she studied Genome wide association study (GWAS) on sorghum biomass production under salinity stress.

Lisa’s current research focuses on understanding the function of bulliform cells in grasses (Setaria viridis and Sorghum bicolor) and how these cells behave under environmental stress. She is using a combination of scanning electron microscopy and LCM-seq laser capture microdissection to study the anatomical morphology, physiology, and gene expression patterns of these cells.
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Aside from academia, Lisa enjoys  dancing, reading, and writing. She is also a STEM outreach advocate and co-founder of Afro in Bio, an organization dedicated to increasing representation and support for black scientists in the field of biology. As a black woman in STEM, she is committed to increasing diversity and inclusion in the field and strives to become a professor of plant biology, mentoring and supporting underrepresented students and promoting equity and access to education and research opportunities.

Maketalena Aleamotu’a
I am Maketalena Aleamotu’a from the Kingdom of Tonga, a small Polynesian nation in the South Pacific. I undertook my undergraduate degree and MSc at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, with my Master’s research focused on identifying single-stranded DNA viruses from Tongan bat guano. Having always had an interest in how plants work at the molecular level, I changed fields to plant biology for my PhD. My recently submitted thesis (University of Newcastle, Australia) investigated the cellular and molecular biology of phi thickening development in Brassica roots, and identified novel genetic loci linked to jasmonic acid-induced phi thickening development

Iman Yangaza
Iman is an Assistant lecturer in the Department of Botany, University of Dar es Salaam. He holds MSc in Climate Change and Sustainable Development and a BSc in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology from the University of Dar es Salaam. Iman is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Botany at the University of Dar es Salaam. His research is on assessing Avocado’s (Persea americana) genetic diversity and productivity in Tanzania. He has attended training, including plant tissue culture in India (2017) and plant molecular biology in Kenya (2021). His interest is in plant biology, climate change, and scientific data mining.