Prospective Students

Soils, Plants, and Consumers

An Interdisciplinary Doctoral Training on the Relationship between Plants and Human Health

Are you interested in plant chemistry and the potential of plant chemicals to prevent or treat diseases?  Or maybe you are interested in how people choose and prepare the foods that they eat and how those choices impact their health?  Or maybe you are interested in how plant genetics influences the resistance of plants to diseases, changes how they taste, or affects their ability to accumulate nutrients or toxins from the soil? 

If that is the case, then this is the doctoral training program for you. A team of faculty at Penn State University with expertise in food science, plant science, soil science, ethnobotany, sensory science, and toxicology is recruiting a cohort of doctoral students to pursue interdisciplinary, collaborative research on the relationship between soils, plants, and consumer health.

Opportunities exist to conduct studies on food plants and plant-based foods such as cacao and chocolate, grapes and wine, cloves, beer, and tea as well as medicinal plants such as goldenseal and American ginseng. The cohort members will also participate in various professional development activities and will be supported in applying for additional fellowship funding.

PhD students for the cohort are being recruited through the graduate programs in Food Science, Forest Resources, Agricultural and Environmental Plant Science, Plant Biology, Pathobiology, and Soil Science. Each student will receive a graduate assistantship, tuition remission, and a subsidy for health insurance. For more information, please contact Dr. Joshua Lambert (email: jdl134@psu.edu) or the participating faculty in the graduate program to which you are interested in applying.