From Student to Teacher: A Conversation with a Former NYBG Graduate Student

Posted in Past and Present on November 3, 2015 by Stevenson Swanson

Stevenson Swanson is the Science Media Manager at The New York Botanical Garden.

Like most scientific research institutions, The New York Botanical Garden regularly hosts visiting scientists, but it’s especially gratifying to welcome back former graduate students who have gone on to important positions elsewhere.

That was the case recently when Natalia Pabón-Mora, Ph.D., returned to the Garden for several weeks. Dr. Pabón-Mora, who received her Ph.D. in 2012, is currently a professor at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia.

She took a break from her research to talk with Lawrence M. Kelly, Ph.D., Director of the Commodore Matthew Perry Graduate Studies Program at the Botanical Garden, about what attracted her to the Garden as a place to study plant science.

“I quickly realized that the program here was a wonderful place to be a graduate student,” she tells Dr. Kelly in this video. “The Garden has curators that are expert in basically every branch of the plant kingdom. . . . That’s something you wouldn’t find in a single faculty in any university.”