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Inside IGI Climate 2024 Celebrates the Institute’s Growing Focus on Climate Change Research
Earlier this month, over 250 people came to the Pauley Ballroom on the UC Berkeley campus to attended Inside IGI Climate 2024, the annual conference where IGI members come together to share their latest research, learn from others, and make connections for future collaborations. The 2023 Inside IGI was focused on health, while this year’s conference focused on climate and sustainable agriculture, but true to IGI’s interdisciplinary nature, attendees covered the full breadth of IGI’s research areas from therapeutics to genomic technology development as well as plant and microbial research, and included people from UC Berkeley, UCSF, UC Davis, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore Lab, and more.
While most of the day’s program focused on recent research within IGI labs on topics like methane reduction and crop improvement, the morning kicked off with guest speakers to help set the context for why we put our energy into solving large problems in climate and agriculture. UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons opened the day with his vision for stimulating climate innovation, USDA’s Chief Scientist Chavonda Jacobs-Young spoke with Jennifer Doudna about federal efforts to support climate and agricultural research, and California’s Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot spoke with Melinda Kliegman about the state’s climate goals and support of research.
Chancellor Rich Lyons kicks off the conference with his vision for innovation at UC Berkeley.
IGI’s climate research has grown significantly since 2020, when Executive Director Brad Ringeisen joined the institute, supported by multiple large gifts enabling research into carbon removal, reducing agricultural emissions, and developing climate change resilient crops. At the end of the day, Ringeisen and Doudna laid out a vision for the next 10 years of climate research at the IGI, underscoring the importance of developing AI and machine learning tools for the CRISPR genome editing community, to improving editing, discover and engineer climate-important proteins, improve carbon capture in agricultural soils, and reduce agricultural emissions at scale.
The day concluded with a poster session featuring 47 projects covering the full scope of IGI research. Awards went to Dror Assa and Alison Bien (Nguyen lab, 1st place), Donat Wulf (Niyogi lab, 2nd place), and Carlos Iglesias-Aguirre and Rebecca Garner (Diamond lab, tied for 3rd place).
Browse some of the photo highlights from the day in the galleries above and below (photos and IGI t-shirt design by Glenn Ramit).
Professor Venkatesan Sundaresan, recent recipient of the Wolf Prize in Agriculture, talks about his lab's breakthrough work on self-cloning hybrid crops.
