Stephanie Conway
Visiting Fellow, Friedman Lab
Ph.D. Candidate, The University of Melbourne
Education
PhD candidate, The University of Melbourne, School of Botany
BSc The University of Melbourne, Australia, (Honours) First Class
The shoot apical meristem is a small area of undifferentiated cells at the tips of shoots that provides all the new primary tissue for the growing stem. This embryonic region of cells has fascinated botanists for centuries and has unique potential for providing comparable patterns of early shoot development across taxa. My research focuses on these anatomical patterns within the four lineages of gymnosperms; cycads, Ginkgo, conifers and Gnetales. I have previously studied the apical meristem in leptosporangiate ferns and I am particularly interested in the evolutionary development of the apical meristem and what this tells us about the evolution of shoot architecture.