Bethany Holland
Postdoctoral researcher
Michigan State University
Dr. Bethany Holland is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Stephen Long at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working on the Enabling Nutrient Symbioses in Agriculture (ENSA) project. She is creating a mechanistic model of nitrogen fixation to quantify the energetic requirements of processes in the roots. This work aims to combine models of N fixation with crop scale models and a mechanistic model of photosynthesis to better understand the dynamics between carbon and nitrogen within the plant, determining when nitrogen fixation switches from a net gain for carbon fixation and overall plant growth to a net drain on fixed carbon. Her wider interest is in improving plant growth by mathematically modelling the allocation of carbon and nitrogen to sources and sinks.
She received her doctorate in plant sciences (supervised by Prof. Colin P. Osborne, Prof. Richard H. Clayton & Prof Nick A.M. Monk) from the University of Sheffield in 2019 titled “Modelling plant growth by investigating source-sink dynamics” and a master's degree in industrial mathematical modelling from Loughborough University in 2015.