Taylorlab

The UC Davis post-harvest centre was founded over 40 years ago by Adel Kader. The aim of this centre is to coordinate and gather knowledge to reduce postharvest losses and improve the product quality. From there till now, the postharvest centre remains as one of the top sources of postharvest knowledge offering three courses: Fruit ripening, Postharvest short-course and the Fresh cut workshop.

Taylor lab would like to wish everyone a happy new year. At this time of year we would like to reflect on our last year’s achievements. 

Last year was an eventful year for us with two of our PhD students submitting their theses, ten publications, six lab members new to our UC Davis campus, three new studentship appointments and a former student is visiting the department as part of her fellowship. 

A new analysis in Taylor Lab suggests that long- term, multi-generational response of plants to rising CO2  are similar to those found in single generation FACE experiments, with consequences for continued global greening and future higher rates of photosynthesis.

Time-traveling plants that could move forward and backwards across the decades would be extremely valuable in understanding how these photosynthesizing organisms are likely to respond to the altered conditions predicted as a consequence of anthropogenic climate change.

My PhD started back in January 2000 and I was the first student between Gail and Vitacress Salads Ltd - Something I was very proud to be.  I joined Vitacress full time after a summer spell working with Poplar in Italy and I was in various posts there until March 2015.  In my time at Vitacress I was responsible for a number of innovations and improvements and remained a visitor at Southampton University where I was involved in the research programmes that followed my PhD.

Nine years after starting a PhD with Vitacress, I am now working as an Agronomist for the company. 

Fangzhu Zhang is now a Lecturer in China Planning at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL (2011-present). She worked at the School of City Planning, Cardiff University (2006-2011) and University of Southampton (2000-2002) before joining the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. She received her Ph.D. degree from Gail Taylor’s Lab,  the University of Southampton, UK in 2006. Her main research interests include innovation and science parks, especially biotechnology R&D in EU and China, sustainable development and Chinese eco-cities.