Lab Members

Dr. Olivia Wilkins
Principal Investigator
Dr. Olivia Wilkins leads the Plant Systems Biology research group at the University of Manitoba. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2010. From 2011 to 2015, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Genomics and Systems Biology at New York University. In 2015, she was a Visiting Scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. In 2013, she was awarded a Basic Research to Enable Agricultural Development Award from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2016, she joined the Faculty at McGill University, and in 2019 she joined the Faculty at the University of Manitoba. She serves on the editorial boards of multiple scientific journals and is an active participant in the Graduate Women in Science Fellowship Committee.

Arshani Alukumbura
Research Technician
2022 MSc Department of Plant Science, University of Manitoba
2018 BSc Honours in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.
I love working in molecular biology laboratories doing research and am always excited to try something new in the lab. I am working on several research projects to understand plant gene expressions in response to climate change stressors, in different plant tissues and individual cells using transcriptomic, proteomic and genetic engineering techniques.

Wisdom Akandwanaho
MSc Student, co-supervised with Dr. Claudio Stasolla
2022 Bachelor of Science: Agricultural Biotechnology Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana (West Africa)
Wisdom has a passion for plant molecular biology. He is investigating how individual cells in the root apical meristem of the Arabidopsis plant respond to conditions of high moisture and low oxygen. He is working toward an MSc degree in the Department of Plant Science.

Elisa Gan
Bachelor of Science (Biochemistry) Student
Spatial heterogeneity in drought stress responses

Amy Fernando
Bachelor of Science (Hons.) Student co-supervised with Dr. Joseph Gordon
Honours thesis title: Alternative Bnip3 splicing in pediatric alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma
Alumni
Postdoctoral Researchers
Rajiv Kumar Tripathi (2020-2021)
Md Bulbul Ahmed (2017-2018) McGill
PhD Students
Jack Lamont, co-supervised (2016-2017) McGill
MSc Students
Jérôme Gélinas-Bélanger (2019) McGill
Ruite Chen (2019) McGill
Olivia Haley, co-supervised (2017) McGill
Undergraduate Researchers
Geoffrey Pagcaliwagan, NSERC USRA (2021)
Aaron Shalev, NSERC USRA (2020) co-supervised
Aaron Nedéléc, USRA (2020) co-supervised
Arlo Reichert, USRA (2020) co-supervised
MinJeong Kang, Project Student (2019, 2020)
Jonathan Sangiovanni, Project Student (2018, 2019) McGill
Azriel Abraham Lopez Jauregui, MITACS Globalink Scholar, Tecnológico de Monterey (2018) McGill
Raúl Ernesto Flores González, MITACS Globalink Scholar, Tecnológico de Monterey (2018) McGill
Vincent McCarty, NSERC USRA (2018) McGill
Cesarée Morier-Gxoyiya, Project Student (2018) McGill
Phillip Rosenbaum, NSERC USRA (2017, 2018) McGill
Jérôme Gélinas-Bélanger, NSERC USRA (2017) McGill
Co-op Students
Sarah Campbell (Fall 2020, Winter 2021)
Joohee Lee (Winter 2020)
Sean Robertson (Winter 2020)
Honours Students
Vincent McCarty (2018-2019) McGill