February 21, 2022
Valent to present Feb. 28 Distinguished Graduate Faculty lecture
Submitted by Miranda Schremmer
The Graduate School has recognized Barbara Valent, university distinguished professor of plant pathology, as a 2021-2022 Commerce Bank and W.T. Kemper Foundation Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award recipient.
Valent will make a public presentation on her work at 3:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 28, at the Leadership Studies Building Town Hall as part of the Commerce Bank and W.T. Kemper Foundation Distinguished Graduate Faculty Award. The title of her talk is "Protecting the Global Food Supply from a Cereal Killer."
An internationally recognized scholar, Valent has made high-impact contributions to our understanding of plant diseases that threaten global food security. She has spent decades studying fungal diseases — blasts — in rice and wheat, which threaten crops both in Kansas and worldwide. Valent's research team pioneered microscopic techniques for visualizing molecular plant-microbe interactions in real time. Her work has been influential and has been adapted by peers to study other plant-pathogen interactions.
Valent has been successful in securing more than $14 million in grant funding as principal or co-principal investigator. She has authored more than 130 peer-reviewed articles with more than 19,700 citations. Much of Valent's work has been published in elite and highly interdisciplinary journals. For her work published in The Plant Cell, she was named Top Author by the American Society of Plant Biologists.
All are invited to join Valent's lecture.