Robigalia Roundup LXXXIII: Tell your students about these funding deadlines

Hello {{first_name | Robigalia readers}},

This week I want to flag some funding opportunities for students and early career researchers, courtesy of two of our phytopathological societies.

The Australasian Plant Pathology Society (APPS) has three schemes worth knowing about.

The ECR Bursary is currently open for two special interest group meetings: the Australasian Soil Disease Symposium (ASDS, closing 1 July) and the Australasian Plant Virology Workshop (APVW, closing 1 August). Each award covers up to $1,500 for registration, travel, and accommodation, and is open to Honours, Masters, and PhD students as well as ECRs up to five years post-PhD based in Australasia, the Pacific, or Southeast Asia. You'll need to have submitted an abstract and be intending to present.

The Trevor Wicks Memorial Travel Bursary is a separate award of up to $3,000 to support travel to an international conference in the 2026-27 financial year. Established in memory of Dr Trevor Wicks, who mentored generations of students and ECRs during his career at the South Australian Research and Development Institute, it's open to Australian citizens and permanent residents enrolled in a postgraduate research degree or employed as a researcher within five years of graduation. Preference is given to applicants working in horticultural or viticultural pathology.

The British Society for Plant Pathology (BSPP) has two comparable schemes open to applicants worldwide, not just those based in the UK.

The MSc/MRes Bursary offers up to GBP 4,000 per student, and up to five are awarded each year. It can be put towards course fees, accommodation, or costs associated with a research visit to another institution. The deadline for 2026 applications is 30 June.

The BSPP Travel Fund is open to BSPP members and covers up to half of total costs (capped at GBP 1,000) for conferences, study tours, or research visits. Students attending BSPP conferences can apply even if they've been members for less than 12 months. Applications are assessed quarterly, with the next deadline on 31 August.

If you're supervising postgraduate students, these are worth passing on directly.

Now, onto this week’s edition:

Let’s dive in!

Quantifying disease severity from field photographs has been a long-running ambition in plant pathology, but the bottleneck is rarely the imaging. It is the annotated data needed to train models that can tell rust from necrosis, shadow, and chlorosis under real canopy conditions, and that data is expensive to produce.

A paper by Romero-Benavides et al., published last week in Plant Pathology, evaluates whether foundation segmentation models can estimate coffee leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix) severity reliably without disease-specific training. The authors curated 1285 field images of Coffea arabica and C. canephora from Minas Gerais, generated 606 pixel-level lesion masks, and benchmarked five segmentation approaches against an independent set of 100 hand-annotated leaves.

The pipeline combined YOLOv8 to detect leaves in complex branch-level images with SAM2 to extract individual leaf masks, then compared classical thresholding (ImageJ), palette-based segmentation (pliman), a fully supervised DeepLabV3+ model, a fine-tuned SAM2, and a zero-shot SAM3 prompted with the text "yellow spot".

SAM3 in zero-shot mode produced the strongest segmentation, with a median Dice of 0.91 and IoU of 0.83, and balanced precision (0.93) and recall (0.94). DeepLabV3+ followed at Dice 0.86. The classical methods showed high recall but precision below 0.70, systematically overestimating diseased area when necrosis, shadows, or chlorosis resembled rust lesions. Agreement with the gold-standard severity values, measured by Lin's concordance correlation coefficient, reached 0.95 for SAM3, compared with 0.87 and 0.89 for two trained human raters assessing the same leaves in an earlier study.

The result is notable because SAM3 received no rust-specific training. It outperformed both classical tools and a supervised network trained on curated rust masks, and it did so on the kind of messy, complex-background imagery that has historically frustrated automated severity tools. The practical implication is that foundation-model segmentation could underpin field-deployable, mobile-based severity assessment without the per-disease retraining that has slowed adoption of computer vision in phytopathometry.

In 1890s Kansas, a disease swept through wheat fields so devastatingly that farmers called the shrivelled, chalky kernels left behind "tombstones." The culprit was Fusarium graminearum, and more than a century later, it remains one of the most economically destructive plant pathogens in cereal agriculture worldwide. Between 1993 and 2014, Fusarium head blight cost American wheat farmers an estimated $17 billion, and it continues to inflict losses wherever wheat and barley are grown at scale.

Fusarium graminearum (teleomorph: Gibberella zeae) is an ascomycetous fungus in the family Nectriaceae. It occupies a dual ecological role, persisting as a saprophyte on crop debris in the soil and switching to aggressive parasitism when conditions align. The fungus spreads via both asexual macroconidia, which disperse locally during the growing season in splash events, and sexual ascospores, which can travel considerable distances through the air and are the primary source of inoculum at flowering.

The pathogen's host range spans wheat, barley, oats, triticale, maize, and many wild grass species, causing Fusarium head blight in small grains and ear rot and stalk rot in maize. Infected wheat spikelets bleach rapidly, progressing from water-soaked to chalky white, often moving sequentially up the head. The shrivelled grain that results is frequently colonised by salmon-orange sporodochia.

Beyond the visible destruction, F. graminearum produces potent mycotoxins, principally deoxynivalenol (DON, or vomitoxin) and zearalenone, which render contaminated grain unsafe for human consumption and animal feed.

Fusarium graminearum is distributed across temperate cereal-growing regions globally. In China, more than 9.9 million hectares of wheat were affected in the 2012 epidemic alone, and in Argentina, 17 major epidemics between 1960 and 2012 caused losses of up to 70% in affected fields. Disease severity peaks when warm, humid conditions coincide with anthesis, particularly after prolonged periods of high relative humidity around flowering.

Host resistance is the cornerstone of integrated approaches to management, and resistance quantitative trait loci such as Fhb1 have been successfully introgressed into bread wheat, though effective resistance in durum wheat remains limited. Crop rotation away from maize and cereals, combined with residue management, reduces inoculum carryover between seasons. Triazole fungicides applied at early flowering provide meaningful suppression, though the selection pressure they impose is steadily eroding fungicide efficacy in some populations.

There is growing interest in whether shifts in agronomic practice, particularly the adoption of cover crops and reduced tillage, are reshaping the soil fungal community in ways that influence F. graminearum dynamics in maize systems. That intersection of sustainable farming and pathogen ecology is exactly where this week's plant pathologist works.

This week, we meet Theo Newbold, a plant pathologist completing their PhD in plant pathology and microbiome science at The Pennsylvania State University.

Theo's path into the field was not a direct one. After four years at a community college in Pasadena, California, they transferred to California State University Monterey Bay for a BS in biology, where the first few semesters were a period of searching, moving through field ecology and then a year as an environmental restoration educator.

In their fourth semester, they met Dr Timothy Miles, the only plant pathologist on campus, who offered them a position in his fungal genetics lab as an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Center scholar. That role gave Theo their first research experience in plant pathology and took them to the American Phytopathological Society 2017 meeting. Graduate school had not been on the table until then. Working with Miles and meeting the wider plant pathology community shifted that completely.

What pulled them in was the recognition that plant pathology sits at the centre of food scarcity, global inequities in research and funding, and the daily challenges growers face in meeting demand. Theo came to see the discipline as community care and service, and that framing has shaped their direction ever since.

Theo's thesis examines how biotic and abiotic factors shape the foliar fungal endophyte community in corn, drawing on applied plant pathology, agroecology, and microbiome science. The focus is on Fusarium species that colonise leaves endophytically but include important pathogens and mycotoxin producers. Fusarium graminearum and Fusarium verticillioides cause ear and stalk rots and produce mycotoxins such as deoxynivalenol and fumonisins, which contaminate grain and silage and pose serious risks to livestock. Leaves make up nearly a fifth of silage dry weight, yet little is known about what drives Fusarium foliar endophyte communities. Using field studies, amplicon-based sequencing, and bioinformatics, Theo is tracking how plant development, drought, and non-target fungicide use shape these communities.

Theo is a 2023 to 2026 Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research (FFAR) Fellow, and credits the program with much of their professional development through workshops, industry visits, and formal mentorship. After their PhD, they want to work in applied research across government, industry, or the nonprofit sector, solving problems with direct impact on growers and food systems.

Connect with Theo on LinkedIn to follow their work as they move from doctoral research into the next phase of their career.

Have a job, scholarship, or event to advertise? List it in for FREE Robigalia. I’ll help promote your opportunity or event to a global network of over 10,000 plant pathologists.

See you next Monday!

P.S. Why Robigalia? The name originates from the Ancient Roman festival dedicated to crop protection. You can read all about the history here: