News

Recent News

March 2026 -- Congratulations to Joel Erberich who defended his PhD thesis on Friday March 13th, and to research associate Alysse Pusey starting a new position at Until.  Stay tuned for Joel's next paper on Herbarium genetics with Patti Lang's group at UCB!

December 2025 -- New preprint from Monalisha Rath in collaboration with mathematician Madhav Mani (Northwestern) looks at where there is natural variation in the behavior of the stomatal lineage, and how this variation might be used for environmental response.  This is a new field for us, inspired by eco-evo and comparative development studies from previous lab members (esp. Patti Lang, Ido Nir and Gabe Amador).

October 2025 -- Postdoc Deka Mohamed honored for her work building the plant biology community at Stanford. See her featured in the Stanford Report! 

May 2025 -- The lab turns 20!  Brenda Koehler organized a wonderful celebration on Stanford's campus where we met with campus arborists, art curators and tree enthusiasts to learn the history and biology of campus trees.  The current lab members are the living embodiment of our mantra: Stomata Forever! 

May 2025 -- Gabriel Amador gave a captivating oral defense of his dissertation to a packed audience of developmental and plant biologists. Congratulations Gabe!  

April 2025 -- We welcome new postdoc Mabel Mathew! Mabel is interested in plant cell and tissue polarity, mechanics and regeneration and will be pursuing at least two of those three topics in her postdoc.

March 2025 -- Hannah Fung's PhD work on cell size control in stomatal lineage cells was published. Size matters, but different sizes matter differently for different epidermal cells [link]

May 2024 -- Lab retreat at the beach in Marin county, great food, science and tidepools.

May 2024 -- Congratulations to Hannah Fung, who presented a brilliant oral defense of her PhD thesis!

April 2024 -- Welcome to our newest scientist, Dr. Genevieve Stier, who brings real botany expertise to the team. 

March 2024 -- The second of Sophie Wallner's papers on the mysterious OPL2 protein, this time joining forces with proteomics and AI-protein prediction experts to discover what OPL2 might be doing when it is redeployed during the division that creates the paired stomatal guard cells and the pore between them [link].

February 2024 -- Congratulations to Deka for being awarded a Canadian NSERC postdoctoral fellowship!  And congratulations to former postdoc Michael Raissig for earning tenure at University of Bern.

December 2023 -- We say farewell to an eventful year!  Congratulations to Alexis for being awarded an EMBO LT Postdoctoral fellowship and to Siobhán for passing her 2nd year quals and becoming a PhD candidate.  

November 2023 -- Two new preprints on two very different projects.  Ido Nir led a project making edits in our favorite gene in tomato that alter the way the plants perceive environmental cues when making stomata.  Sophie Wallner led a project that combines our love of cell polarity with proteomics and some cool AI-tools for predicting how proteins interact.

November 2023 -- Alumni update: Chin-Min Kimmy Ho received the Shang-Fa Yang outstanding young scientist award and there is a lovely journal profile on (newly tenured) On Sun Lau. Congratulations both! 

October 2023 -- A new lab is born! Patricia Lang is starting her lab in the Plant and Microbial Biology (PMB) Department at UC Berkeley. She officially starts in January 2024, but you can check out her plans to mitigate future climate change by learning from plants' past genetic histories here.

September 2023 -- A season of changes. We say goodbye to Dr. Margot Smit and wish her all the best as she starts her own lab at the ZMBP in Tübingen, Germany.  We say hello to Dr. Deka Mohammed, joining us from U. Toronto, and a cool new collaborative project.

September 2023 -- Our paper on how stomatal lineage cells measure their own size to make cell fate decisions is now published!  And we have a new preprint on how stomatal transcription factors engage chromatin to guide fate transitions.

August 2023 -- See Sophie Wallner's paper on a second axis of polarity in stomatal cells. Come for the beautiful Arabidopsis images, stay for a diversion into her new model system (the liverwort Marchantia) with the Dolan Lab @GMI, Vienna. 

July 2023 -- Andrew Muroyama's paper on how plant cells ensure the reliable inheritance of their own polarity is out! 

July 2023 -- lab retreat in Jenner, CA!

June 2023--listen to a podcast of Margot talking with Arif Asraf about her work on the origin and timing of stomata

Podcast: https://t.co/bdD1Eq7Fns
Article: https://t.co/XlTYtoFNdd

June 2023- Postdoc Alexis Lebecq joins the lab!

May 2023- Siobhán Bridson joins the lab as a PhD student!

April 2023- Postdoc Ido Nir started a tenure track position at the Volcani Center, Israel. His lab will study plant plasticity under changing environments!

March 2023-Margot Smit's paper on why embryos turn on all the stomatal genes, but don't make stomata is out in Developmental Cell!

Feb 2023- Katelyn Hansen McKown's paper on comparative stomatal development in Brachy and Arabidopsis is out in Plant Cell! Check out the profile on Katelyn here

Jan 2023- Postdoc Monalisha Rath joins the lab!

Fall 2022- Postdoc Marco D’Ario awarded EMBO, LSRF and HFSP postdoctoral fellowships!