Rena Shimizu Rena was born in the Ehime prefecture of Japan. At an early age, she was interested in swimming and learning English. In 1999, Rena joined Dr. Yuki Ichinose lab in Faculty of Agriculture of Okayama university and worked on the role of flagella and monomer flagellin in the interaction between Pseudomonas syringae pv. tabaci and plants. During part of her PhD, Rena came to the USA where she learned Molecular Microbiology under the supervision of Dr Dallice Mills at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Right after obtaining her PhD, Rena came back to the USA and did a Postdoc in Dr. David Hildebrand's lab in the University of Kentucky on Developing Higher Value Soybeans with Enhanced Disease Resistance. The following year Rena obtained Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and moved to Cornell University in 2004. In these past years of Postdoctoral research at Dr. Alan Collmer's lab in Plant Pathology, she acquired a solid background in the mechanism of type III secretion system of plant pathogen bacteria Ps pv. This research enhanced her interest in plant defense mechanisms against bacterial infection. In 2005, Rena worked in Dr.Jian Hua's lab, also in the Plant Biology Department at Cornell, investigating two distinct but interacting plant responses; one to temperature variations, and one to pathogen invasion using Arabidopsis thaliana as a model. In 2006 Rena joined Dr. Michael Scanlon's lab. Her exciting current project in this lab is functional analysis of the maize gene NARROW SHEATH, which is required for the initiation of lateral leaf domains from shoot meristems. She is also involved in a project studying Cell-Tissue Specific Functional Genomics by Sense-RNAi. Rena likes eating, watching movies (except horror), having a cup of latté at the café with her friends and all kinds of dancing. Recently Rena is learning a little bit of Spanish conversation from her friends. Email: rs334@cornell.edu