Graduate student researcher Alexander Howard has successfully completed the qualifying exam which was for progressing into candidacy in the Biochemistry, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (BMCDB) program. His project proposal was titled "Utilizing Bioinformatics and Machine Learning to Explore Expanded Ligand Binding of the Pik-1 Rice Immune Receptor" and focused on ways to better analyze and model directed evolution data to engineer better plant immune receptors. He is hoping to start generating new receptor variants to test out this year.