Full analysis is here
Published in Plant Disease Management Reports 2014, 2015, and 2016.
Throughout my PhD work, it became obvious that the challenges of spinach downy mildew were most heavily impacting organic growers. They were unable to rely on conventional synthetic pesticides that were able to suitably control disease in the conventional crop, and had to rely on resistance to control the disease. I wanted to see if any biofungicide had effect on the disease.
Ying-Yu Liao gave a nice seminar about her ongoing PhD work looking at Magnesium Oxide nanoparticles and their use for control of bacterial tomato spot disease.
I have three awesome sisters, so this was the painting I made for my sister Mimi’s birthday card. I’m lucky that my work is close by to some really cool gardens on campus, including the Ficke Garden just north of the Microbiology Building.
I put this art up on my redbubble account (https://www.redbubble.com/people/robchoudhury) so that I could buy it in sticker format
My former advisor Neil McRoberts gave a seminar at the UF Plant Pathology department about his work on managing the citrus HLB outbreak in California. They have currently found about 1000 trees in the LA basin with HLB, and the program spends about $40m each year, which he has to fight tooth and nail to get. The disease could devestate California’s citrus market, so managing it early is critical.
I have three awesome sisters, so this was the painting I made for my sister Abby’s birthday card. Florida lights up with tons of azaleas every spring, and my house is surrounded by them, so I wanted her to get a glimpse of some while they were in season. I put this art up on my redbubble account (https://www.redbubble.com/people/robchoudhury) so that I could buy it in sticker format
I was part of an upcoming book chapter on the threat of climate change for pathogens, and all I could think of was the idea of pathogens on the horizon. I painted a watercolor illustration for the book chapter, maybe it’ll be used as the book cover! The painting draws inspiration from Outrun/vaporwave sort of art that became popular in the late 2010’s, although the color palette is wayyyy off, it should be neon blue and pink!
Full analysis is here
Published in Plant Disease Management Reports 2011, and 2012.
During my master’s degree, we set out a lot of projects (I had originally intended for my master’s to be a PhD…but thats a story for another time). So I ended up having a ton of different interconnected projects running with Doug Gubler looking at different aspects of grape powdery mildew biology and epidemiology. While we knew that there were differences in how grape varieties and cultivars reacted to powdery mildew, we couldn’t find a great resource that looked at the cultivars grown in California in the present.
Full analysis here
Haiti is one of our nation’s nearest neighbors, and has been a key player in world history over the past 200 years. The Haitian revolution took nearly 15 years and cost countless lives, but resulted in one of the first nations that was slave-free and ruled by non-whites and former captives. The loss of Haiti (then called Saint-Domingue) forced the cash-starved Napoleon to sell the Louisiana territory to the United States, one of the single largest land purchases in our countries history.
Full analysis here
Global avocado production mostly focuses in Mexico, with the most prominent variety being ‘Hass’. I work on a project researching a disease of avocados (and other plants in the same family, Lauraceae) that causes rapid death, laurel wilt. Avocados in Florida are threatened by laurel wilt. Most production occurs in Miami-Dade county, mostly around the Homestead production region. The avocados grown in Florida tend to be of the West Indian races, whereas Hass are Mexican-Guatamalan hybrid races.