Raizada Lab Personnel

The Raizada Lab (May, 2008)
Left to Right: David Johnston Monje (PhD student), Amelie Gaudin  (PhD student), Adrienne Davidson (Former Undergrad), Michael Tessaro (MSc student), Manish Raizada (Lab Head), Sameh Mahmoud (PhD student), Steve Chatfield (Former Research Associate), Bridget Holmes (Undergrad), Blair Nameth (MSc student), Christophe Liseron-Monfils (PhD student).
Missing: Joseph Nketiah Berchie (Visiting PhD student/scholar from Ghana), Sarah McClymont (Undergrad), Nafisa Tasnim (high school student), Jacqueline Riddle (high school student).

Current Lab Members

Manish N. Raizada (raizada@uoguelph.ca)
Associate Professor
Project(s): Laboratory Head
Biography: I was born in the Indian Himalayas, but spent my very early childhood in Nigeria (West Africa) and then grew up in a suburb of Toronto, Canada. When I was a young teenager at North Park Secondary School (Brampton, Canada), a terrible famine hit in Ethiopia (~1984); the televised images of that horrible event were pivotal to my life.  I later learned that crops were not only a source of food, but was also the major source of income in poor nations.  In countries such as Ethiopia, 80-95% of the population are farmers.  Therefore, to help poor people, agriculture is critical. I combined my love of Genetics with agriculture, and I became a crop geneticist.  After being educated in Canada, California and Mexico, I returned to near my childhood home in Canada to become a faculty member at the University of Guelph, Canada’s oldest and largest agricultural university.  At Guelph, I am so fortunate to work with a fantastic group of dedicated students and researchers, who are not only wonderful scientists, but also care about the world around them. A few years ago, I began to re-focus the efforts of my Lab from basic research to develop technologies to reduce/replace fertilizer inputs, because fertilizers limit crop production, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.  The world’s 1.2 billion poor farmers cannot afford fertilizers, which are constantly increasing in price, because synthetic fertilizer production relies on oil and natural gas which will continue to increase in cost and also contribute to climate change. Our short-term and long-term research projects are directed towards engineering technologies that cost $1 as that is what the world’s bottom billion can afford --- the correct economy of scale. At Guelph, I also enjoy teaching and mentoring, and I have been fortunate to have taught students who probably taught me more than I could ever teach them.

Joseph Nketiah Berchie (jnberchie@yahoo.com, Berchie@cropsresearch.org)
Visiting PhD student from Ghana
Project(s): Drought and photoperiod tests of Africa Bambara Groundnut
Biography:  Joseph is a visiting PhD student/Scholar in the Lab from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and Crop Research Institute, Ghana, West Africa, supported by a Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAIT/CBIE) scholarship. Joseph completed his BSc at the University of Ghana, Legon, and MSc from the University of Nottingham, U.K. with Dr. S.N. Azam-Ali.  He received additional training at the University of Wageningen (Netherlands) and University of Belgrade/Maize Research Institute in the former Yugoslavia. He is a research agronomist in Ghana and in addition to publishing scientific papers, he has also edited ~20 crop management and seed technology training guides, in addition to crop production guides.  Joseph’s PhD focus is on Bambara Groundnut, an underutilized legume crop that is indigenous to Africa, and which holds tremendous promise for food security as it replenishes fertilizer into the soil for other crops such as corn, it is very highly drought tolerant, and it is rich in both protein and carbohydrates.  Joseph is well known in Ghana as he is also a radio commentator.  He is married and has two children.

Amelie Gaudin (agaudind@uoguelph.ca)
PhD Student
Project(s):  Using Aeroponics to Study Corn Root Architecture
Biography: I was born and raised in France, in a beautiful little village near Chablis, in Burgundy. Almost all my family is involved in agriculture, from wine and crop production, irrigation manufacturing to fertilizer and seed businesses. I had a choice to do something else….but somehow my brother and I are (surprisingly) are involved in agriculture! 

I started my studies focusing on soil science and plant production. I was trained to be a technician in crop production but my interest moved towards biotechnologies and plant genetics. I was also motivated to travel and develop an international career. I had the opportunity to do so by enrolling as an international student in a European bachelors degree program in the Netherlands with majors in plant biotechnology and molecular biology. This very positive experience led me to do my major report at the International Potato Centre (CIP) in Lima, Peru. It was so great that I stayed for three years working there after my graduation. I was involved in a research program on the impact of drought stress on yield, physiological parameters and gene expression in Andean potato clones. My position at CIP was a wonderful experience; however I wanted to grow professionally and obtain a doctoral degree…and…here I am! I started in the Autumn of 2007 with Manish and I am currently working on improving the Nitrogen Use Efficiency of corn by better understanding the root system. I am also looking at the role of nutrient availability in regulating the root architecture. I hope to pursuit a focus my research work on plant biotechnology for developing countries and physiology of abiotic stresses.

In my spare time I like to read thrillers and learn languages. I also enjoy sharing time and a nice bottle of wine with my friends. I like to plant flowers and vegetables all around the living room and build crazy growth systems! You’ll find me in the Crop Science building and in the greenhouses, almost everyday!

David Johnston Monje (djohns05@uoguelph.ca)
PhD Student
Project(s):  Discovery of Beneficial Endophytic Microbes in Ancestral Corn
Biography: Biodiversity, biotechnology, and sustainable development. These things are the academic themes which fuel my interest in biology and its application to the conservation and betterment of our natural life on this planet.

I am a Colombian-born Canadian in a doctorate program in the department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph. If I get it, I’m excited to say I will be Dr. David Johnston the Second; my father did two degrees here at the University of Guelph. The research I am doing involves discovering microbes living inside diverse types of corn plants, attempting to understand their contribution to the plant’s survival particularly under low soil nutrient environments.  One of my goals is to discover beneficial inoculants for agriculture.

I am a typical grad student, working late hours, but I have sometimes had a life outside the lab and have some skills/stories to show for it. I am a native Spanish speaker, have previously worked with CGIAR centers in Italy and Peru, lived in Jamaica, Vancouver, and Lebanon. I love SCUBA, capoeira, karaoke, soccer, squash, guitar hero, and just about anything you can imagine. At the University of Guelph I have been an active part of the Graduate Student Association as a general director, the graduate student representative on the Plant Ag speaker series committee, represented Guelph on the Flounders Underwater hockey team, was co-organizer of the 2007 International Development Symposium, and more recently I’m excited to have started the University of Guelph’s first student team to enter into the International Genetically Modified Machines (iGEM) competition held annually at MIT in Boston. This initiative is pulling students from diverse departments across the university, promoting education, volunteerism, leadership, and communication. For this new initiative, I was awarded the 2008 Gordon Nixon leadership award by the University of Guelph under the project title, “Bringing Agriculture and Sustainability to Synthetic Biology”. This project aims to genetically modify symbiotic microbes on plants and animals to improve vitamin A production and help reduce nutritional problems in human and animal nutrition.

The University of Guelph motto is, “Changing lives, improving life.” Without being pretentious, I hope and believe my time here will show my work and my spirit succeeding at this philosophy. If you’ve read this far and want to communicate science, international development, biotechnology, iGEM, or something non-academically fun, please email me and lets talk!

Christophe Liseron-Monfils (cliseron@uoguelph.ca)
PhD Student
Project(s):  Bioinformatics of Microarray Gene Expression in Maize Roots and the Effect of Nitrogen on the Maize Root Hair Transcriptome
Biography: I was born in the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe or Karukera (Butterfly Island in Arawak language). I spent the first 10 years of my life in a town during the week and in the country or tropical forest during the weekend. My grandmother, who was a farmer, and my grandfather, who was a forest warden, helped me to increase my awareness of the plant world at an early age.

At the age of 10, my family moved to the Southwest of mainland France in the Pyrenees Mountains. I grew up in a village of 150 inhabitants surrounded by cornfields and cattle pasture.

This upbringing has played a role in my wish to study plants. I became really interested in Science thanks to two exceptional high school teachers, one teaching Physics-Chemistry and the other one teaching Natural Sciences. They knew how to share their passion with their students. Consequently I did a Bachelors degree in Cell biology, Physiology and Genetics at the University of Toulouse 3 (Paul Sabatier) in France. I then completed a Masters’ degree (in co-op) in Plant Physiology and Genetics with a major in Plant Biotechnology. As part of my Masters’, I worked at Biogemma’s Bioinformatic and Genomic laboratory in Evry (south of Paris) for 1 year. 

With my fiancée, we decided to move to Canada because we both had always dreamed of living abroad; also, I had a strong desire to complete my education in an English-speaking environment prior to returning to the corporate world. After various experiences, I started an exciting PhD project in Manish’s Laboratory in September 2007. I am using functional genomics and bioinformatics to discover potential gene promoters that can be used to engineer root tissue specific gene expression in response to nitrogen and also genes to accelerate the early development of corn to take up soil nitrogen. I am also focusing on the transcriptome of the root hair, as it is the primary absorbing surface for nitrogen fertilizer. In the long run, this research can also lead to the discovery of marker genes for crop improvement by traditional breeding.

As my life goal, I would to like to use genomic tools to help the development of agriculture and crops in developing countries and I want to carry on discovering the world.

Sameh Mahmoud (smahmoud@uoguelph.ca)
PhD Student
Project(s):   Genomic, Microscopy and Biochemical Analysis of a Beneficial Fungal Endophyte that Produces the Anti-Cancer Drug, Taxol
Biography:  I come from Egypt where I received my BSc in Pharmacy in 1998/99 and my MSc in Pharmacy in 2004.  Before coming to Canada, I held the position of Assistant Lecturer in Pharmacognosy and medicinal plant biotechnology at Zagazig University in Egypt.  When I arrived in Canada, I worked at a teaching assistant in Forestry at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton before coming to Guelph to pursue a PhD under Manish’s guidance.  I have skills in molecular biology and metabolic engineering and undertook tissue culture and biotechnology training at the Atomic Energy Center during 2001-2004.  My current research entails biochemical, molecular and microscopic approaches to better characterize Taxol-producing endophytic fungi and the fungal Taxol biosynthetic pathway, with the long-term goal of increasing Taxol production. My other research interests include primary and secondary metabolites in plants and microbes; biotechnology and metabolic engineering of secondary metabolites to be used in medicine for various human health applications; elicitation studies of secondary metabolites under the effects of different elicitors using large scale culture systems; and botanical and plant-environmental association studies.  I am married and the father of two children.  In my leisure time, I enjoy football, reading, music and ornamental plant cultivation.

M. Blair Nameth (namethm@uoguelph.ca)
MSc Student
Project(s):  Light effects on shoot regeneration in Arabidopsis thaliana
Biography: I grew up in Toronto with my parents and two younger sisters. For as far back as I can remember, I have always loved spending time outside in the extensive city park systems and gardens near my home. I am pleased to have had the experience of two school breaks of working and learning at busy garden centres where I survived the high energy chaos of shopping gardeners, beginners and the more experienced, anxious to ‘dig in’ each spring.
I completed my undergraduate degree in biology at McMaster University (Hamilton, Canada) and it was there that I discovered my interest in plant sciences. After taking several plant-based courses and completing my senior thesis research project in a plant biology lab, I decided to pursue this area of interest further. I enthusiastically joined Dr. Manish Raizada’s Lab as an M.Sc student in September 2007. My project focuses on ‘the effect of light on Arabidopsis shoot and root regeneration’. I have learned so much about agriculture in the department.
In my spare time I enjoy yoga, reading, swimming and spending time with family and friends. I’m looking forward to the rest of my time here in Guelph and exploring all it has to offer – the market, arboretum, paths along the Speed River, etc.

Michael Tessaro (mtessaro@uoguelph.ca)
MSc Student
Project(s):  Engineering of Inexpensive Biosensors to Measure Nitrogen Metabolites
Biography: I grew up on a small hobby farm in the small town of Caledonia, Ontario, Canada. Right from the start I was always interested in nature. That interest continued to grow through high school where I was most interested in biochemistry and genetics. I started my undergrad at the University of Guelph in biological chemistry (you would think it would have a lot of biology in it, right?) but quickly learned that I didn’t care all that much for chemistry. So, at the end of my second year I switched to molecular biology and genetics and found the content to be a good fit with my interests. My interests in molecular biology have remained fairly broad, everything from plants to animals, bacteria and viruses. Fortunately there is a great deal of overlap in these areas and focusing on one group doesn’t limit you from working on the others. It was during my third year as an undergrad that I took Manish’s fourth year course, Plant Molecular Genetics (MGB*4300 -- there really should be more courses like that one). By that time I had already developed an interest in plants, namely orchids, carnivorous plants, and basic horticulture, but like I fear many molecular biologists I didn’t find research in plants to be all that interesting. Manish’s course turned my opinion of plants and plant research around.

During Manish’s course I inquired about doing my 4th year research project with him and I was fortunate enough to be accepted and work on a project that was completely novel to me. I started my master’s in his Lab in September’07, along with several other new grad students, and I have continued to work on the same subject matter I did for my research project. Now to back peddle a little, my current research isn’t on plants directly; I am working to develop biosensors, which use biological sensors to detect nitrogen metabolites, to aid farmers and researchers.

In keeping with my varied research interests, my hobbies and personal interests are also quite varied and include fitness and nutrition, orchid culture/collecting (I’ll need a greenhouse soon just to house my ever growing collection), SCUBA diving, rock climbing, hiking, kayaking,  gardening, and reading.

Following the completion of my master’s I hope to continue my education in the field of molecular biology.

Bridget Holmes (bholmes@uoguelph.ca)
Undergrad Research Assistant, BSc Student, University of Guelph
Project(s):  Assisting Amelie Gaudin with the corn aeoponics system and root morphometric analysis

Sarah McClymont (smcclymo@uoguelph.ca)
Undergrad Research Assistant, BSc Student, University of Guelph
Project(s):  Assisting Amelie Gaudin with the corn aeoponics system and root morphometric analysis

Nafisa Tasnim (tasnim_n@hotmail.com)
high school summer research assistant (entering Univ. Ottawa)
Project(s):  Assisting Michael Tessaro in the nitrogen biosensor engineering project

Jacqueline Riddle (Jackie_riddle@hotmail.com)
high school summer research assistant (entering McGill University)
Project(s):  Assisting David Johnston Monje in the bacterial inoculant project

Raizada Lab Alumni