St Cross DPhil Student Celebrates Ralph A. Lewin Prize with Synoxys Lab Colleagues

DPhil Yuming He (far right) with his Synoxys Lab colleagues

St Cross student Yuming He, a final-year DPhil candidate in Interdisciplinary Bioscience, recently celebrated winning the Ralph A. Lewin Prize by bringing members of the Synoxys Lab together for a formal dinner at College.

Based in the Department of Biology, Yuming investigates how plants sense and respond to environmental stresses associated with climate change. His interdisciplinary research combines molecular and synthetic biology with mathematical modelling to explore how crops might be made more resilient to increasingly extreme and unpredictable conditions.
A central achievement of his DPhil has been the development of a synthetic biology system that activates a beneficial gene only when plants experience both flooding and high temperatures. This conditional approach allows plants to grow normally in favourable conditions while increasing their tolerance to flooding when the two stresses occur together. Yuming has successfully validated the system in both the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the oilseed crop Camelina sativa.

The Ralph A. Lewin Prize, generously supported by Dr Lanna Cheng, enabled Yuming to extend a tradition he began after joining St Cross. Inspired by an invitation to a college dinner from a former DPhil student, and by the Chinese tradition of hospitality, he has since used formal dinners to welcome new lab members and mark colleagues’ next steps.

Many members of the highly international and interdisciplinary Synoxys Lab are not affiliated with an Oxford college. The evening therefore offered an opportunity to share in the traditions of St Cross while celebrating the collaboration and friendship at the heart of the lab’s work.