Dormancy, Cold Hardiness, and Phenology in Temperate Fruit Crops

My research focuses on understanding how dormancy, cold tolerance, water relations, and flowering phenology interact during seasonal transitions in temperate fruit crops. My dissertation research integrated multi-trait phenotyping, transcriptomic analyses, and genomic marker development to investigate cold tolerance regulation in sweet cherry while identifying stage-specific transcripts associated with cold tolerance across dormant and flowering stages of development. This work was guided by the development of Low Temperature Exotherm Ratios (LTER), a quantitative framework for tracking floral dormancy through changes in deep supercooling behavior. LTER enables phenological tracking of dormancy progression and can be integrated with physiological and environmental data to support predictive models of dormancy status, cold hardiness, water relations, and bloom timing.

My earlier research in Malus domestica focused on identifying historic apple cultivars in abandoned homesteads in Wyoming and national parks in California using SSR-based genotyping, linking molecular identification with conservation and regional cultivar evaluation. This work established my broader interest in integrating molecular tools with horticultural physiology across perennial fruit systems and identifying cold-tolerant genotypes suited for regional production systems.

My technical background includes Differential Thermal Analysis (DTA), RNA-seq, RT-qPCR marker development, SNP and SSR genotyping, and statistical modeling approaches including GLM and machine-learning frameworks. These approaches support applications ranging from cultivar improvement and germplasm selection to climate adaptation modeling and precision horticulture decision-support tools.