Thomas Buckley ’26

Major

School of Public and International Affairs

Project Title

Plant Pathogens in a High Altitude System

Presentation Link

View Thomas's Presentation

Minor(s): Environmental Studies

I worked on a team studying “flax rust,” an obligate fungal pathogen that parasitizes Lewis flax (Linum lewisii), a wildflower native to western North America. The flax-rust system is a widely used model for understanding the coevolution of plant pathogens and their hosts. Our group collected data on disease spread in 12 different sites with elevations between 2440 and 3410 meters in the area near the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. These data will be used to understand how plant-pathogen interactions vary across an elevational gradient and can also be used to study how climate change will impact disease spread in the coming decades, which has important implications for commercial flax cultivation. Through this project, I gained new insight and appreciation for plant disease dynamics that I hope will inform my future studies.



Internship Year

2024

Project Category

Climate and Environmental Science

Organization(s)

Metcalf Lab, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University - Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Gothic, Colorado

Mentor(s)

C. Jessica E. Metcalf, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Public Affairs, Princeton University; Amanda Gibson, Assistant Professor of Biology, University of Virginia; Juliana Jiranek, Ph.D. candidate, University of Virginia