Principal Investigator: Seung Yon (Sue) Rhee
Research Foundation Professor
Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Plant Biology, & Plant, Soil, and Microbes
Director
Plant Resilience Institute
Michigan State University
- rheeseu6@msu.edu
- Office: Molecular Plant Sciences Building, 1066 Bogue St, East Lansing, MI 48824
Dr. Seung Yon (Sue) Rhee is a Michigan State University Foundation Professor in the departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Plant Biology, and Plant, Soil, and Microbial Sciences and Director of MSU’s Plant Resilience Institute. Dr. Rhee’s group conducts pioneering research on understanding how plants persevere against extreme weather and rising temperatures. They also engineer resilience traits in food and energy crops. Dr. Rhee has extensive leadership, mentoring, and research experience, and has served on over 25 boards and trained over 190 scientists, many of whom have achieved leadership positions in academia, government, and industry.
Dr. Rhee received her B.A. in biology from Swarthmore College in 1992 and a Ph.D. in biology from Stanford University in 1998. In 1999, she joined Carnegie Science as Staff Associate and became the Founding Director of the Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR, https://www.arabidopsis.org/), which has been used by hundreds of thousands of researchers around the world in the last 25 years. She rose through the ranks at Carnegie, before joining MSU in 2023. She has initiated international scientific communities such as Biocuration (https://www.biocuration.org/) and Plant Cell Atlas (PCA, https://www.plantcellatlas.org/) to understand and engineer plant cells using single cell approaches. She also founded and leads several renowned research centers such as Water and Life Interface Institute (WALII, https://www.walii.science/), Plant Metabolic Network (PMN, https://plantcyc.org/), and Center for Sustainable Plant Innovation and Resilience through International Teamwork (C-SPIRIT, https://c-spirit.org/).
Dr. Rhee is interested in training future leaders who come from historically excluded groups and who are interested in working on neglected research and societal problems. She emphasizes training scientists to explore the unknown and become independent in the pursuit of knowledge. While providing individualized training and mentoring program suited for each member, she strives to transition each trainee on creating and fostering agency to own their work and projects. Dr. Rhee is committed to creating a rigorous, collaborative, and innovative training environment. Expectations of lab members, which are elaborated on the lab website, are clearly communicated and discussed during recruitment, onboarding, and regularly throughout the tenure of each member. Dr. Rhee emphasizes responsible conduct of research, leadership, and communications in her training. Leadership based on service to fellow lab members, mentees, and the larger community in the department is highly valued, encouraged, recognized, and acknowledged. Every member of the Rhee lab plays active roles in improving the professional development and work environment for everyone in the lab and department. She meets with each lab member regularly (weekly or biweekly) and discuss not only their research design, implementation, data analysis, visualization, interpretation, and presentation, but also scholarly leadership, communication skills, teaching and mentoring skills, career planning, outreach and community leadership, and wellness and self-improvement. Her group performs individual development plans every six months and constantly evaluate how the training program is going via surveys, one-one meetings, and group discussions.