JONI REY H. CAMPILAN | BIO NARRATIVE

Joni, motivated by the need for plant disease control in Mindanao's banana-reliant communities, will pursue a Ph.D. in Plant Biology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He will study fungal genomes and plant host-pathogen relationships using Fusarium spp. as a model. When he was an undergraduate student at Mindanao State University - General Santos, he became interested in banana pathogens causing plant pandemics, and later spent his time discovering bioresources for the disease during his MS Biology at Notre Dame of Marbel University, where he is now an Assistant Professor. He identified transcriptomes connected to phenotypic changes in mutant rice while working as an intern at the Philippine Genome Center's Core Facility for Bioinformatics - UP Diliman. In the meantime, Joni is passionate about creating inclusive communities and occasionally hosts conversations with various individuals to encourage inclusion through sharing their stories, which he sometimes publishes via podcast.