Botanynerd? Tell me more!

I love plants, don't you? "Botany, Botany, Botany, it's the study of plants! Botany, botany, botany, not the study of ANTS! Botany Botany Botany, yay!" That's a silly cheer that I use with kids to help them remember what the word actually means. I really love identifying plants in the field. Here's my iNaturalist profile: https://www.inaturalist.org/people/spacebotanynerd I have been studying the molecular cell biology, genetics, and physiology of plants that grow in extreme environments since 2003. In 2009 I started working with growing plants for spaceflight. I was part of a team that sent seeds to grow on the Shuttle Discovery in 2010. The first time I visited KSC was in 2010. (I visited Our Saviour's during that trip, and Alice was the cantor!) I did an internship with the Space Crop Production team at KSC in 2017, then finally moved to the area in 2019 when I landed a fellowship with the NASA Postdoctoral Program. That ended in 2023, at which point I was picked up by NASA Ames as a Plant Data Curator for the NASA Archives. But that work dried up in late 2024, at which point I started working with SyNRGE (pronounced synergy) to support NASA research with growing plants in space.