Hello! My name is Erik Spaulding and I’m an Agricultural and Environmental Education Major. I want to go into working with UC ANR to do extension work, so that farmers across California are able to understand modern improvements in farming strategies from research. I also want to go into working with forage and vegetable species, so that traits of interest can be identified in the genome for selective breeding to increase the nutritional content, disease resistance, and saline tolerance of such plants. I greatly enjoy farming, gardening, insects, reading, games and food. I’m currently assisting the lab with genotyping A. thaliana plants for a mutation accumulation experiment, as well as with short-read and HiFi extraction of Pistachio Trees.