This website serves to share my research adventures. My work focuses on characterizing plant developmental responses to stressors and working to mitigate negative effects in crop species.
Brief History
I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Horticulture and Michigan State University who loves to study roots! My research focuses on characterizing plant developmental responses to stressors and working to mitigate negative effects in crop species.
I received my PhD at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana where I studied the effects of elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide on stomatal development in Arabidopsis thaliana. The results from some of this work seeded funding for collaborating labs to study similar effects in monocots. In addition to my research, I won teaching awards at the department, college, and university level.
After graduating, a spent a small stint at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in the Mockler lab. I worked on a project studying the effects of drought in maize. I became fascinated by the role of root responses to stressors and how that will effect the response of the above ground plant.
I started working at Michigan State University by characterizing dry bean root architecture and it's role in Fusarium root rot (FRR) resilience. This has led me down a windy path to understand key developmental traits in the long history of dry beans.
In 2018,I was awarded the USDA Postdoctoral Fellowship to study if and how dry bean breeding programs have been indirectly selecting for root traits when trying to promote a short, upright shoot architecture conducive to combine harvesting.
Getting to the root of the problem
The Haus Lab research program focuses on improving food production without compromising on food quality and environmental sustainability.
Food security is a driving factor of my research program. Michigan is the second most diverse state for food production with a wide array of crop species, each with a unique set of challenges limiting production. Michigan is the leading producers of black and navy beans, tart cherries, and pickling cucumbers. We also produce asparagus, apples, grapes, and a wide variety of winter squash!
Root development and physiology are one answer to these challenges. With increasing fertilizer costs, greater incidence and severity of extreme weather events like drought and flooding, or a need to reduce carbon dioxide escape from tillage farming, there is an increasing demand to understand root development, physiology, and architecture in horticultural species.
Conferences, Publications, or Root Journal Club
