Emily Bechtold Receives Curt Thorne Award

Emily Bechtold is the 2022 recipient of the Curt Thorne Carry On Award. Emily is a 2022 graduate of the Microbiology Graduate Program and completed her dissertation in Klaus Nüsslein’s lab where her work focused on understanding microbial community dynamics and plant-microbe interactions on the leaves of agriculturally important plants. She was especially interested in how these relationships change under climate stress with the goal of utilizing microbes to sustainably promote agricultural production. In her research, Emily discovered that drought altered the host-associated microbial community structure, and that the degree of change directly related to the species identity of the plant host and to the plant growth environment. She also found that leaf-associated microbes from grasslands are an important contributor of nitrogen into the ecosystem through the process of nitrogen fixation. Emily is now a postdoctoral research scientist at Colorado State University studying microbial involvement in greenhouse gas emissions from freshwater wetlands.