UC Davis doctoral candidate Pallavi Shakya delivering her prize-winning talk at the 36th Symposium of the European Society of Nematologists, The Netherlands. Courtesy photo

DAVIS, CA (MPG) - UC Davis doctoral candidate Pallavi Shakya of the lab of nematologist Shahid Siddique won “Best Student/Early Career Talk” at the 36th Symposium of the European Society of Nematologists, held recently in Egmond aan Zee, The Netherlands.

The global competition drew 41 participants. Another student, Beth Molloy from the Crop Science Centre at the University of Cambridge, also scored a first, the only two awards presented.

“I truly had a wonderful time at the conference, talking about the weird and fascinating world of nematode genomes and biology,” Shakya said. “It was a great experience, and I felt very privileged to speak among some of the greatest minds in nematology.”

Shakya, a nematologist and computational biologist based in the UC Davis Department of Plant Pathology and advised by Siddique, received her master’s degree in biotechnology in 2020 from Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and her bachelor’s degree in biotechnology in 2016 from SANN International College, Purbanchal University, Nepal. She speaks four languages fluently, English, Nepali, Hindi and Nepal Bhasa, with intermediate proficiency in Dutch.

Shakya is the first author of a highly acclaimed research paper published by a 15-member international team last November in PLoS Pathogens. The paper, titled “High-Resolution Genome Assembly and Linkage Mapping in Meloidogyne hapla Reveal Non-Canonical Telomere Repeats and Recombination Hotspots Associated with Effector Proteins,” is co-authored by associate professor Siddique; UC Davis professor emerita Valerie Williamson; UC Davis doctoral candidate Alison Blundell; UC Davis postdoctoral researcher Dadong Dai, and UC Davis researchers Jacinta Gimeno and Adam Taranto. Several scientists from The Netherlands, France and Croatia contributed as co-authors.