Isaac Osei-Bonsu won a poster award at the 2017 “Feed the Future” Legume Innovation Lab conference this past summer, which took place in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
Osei-Bonsu’s oral and poster presentations focused on his research to improve photosynthetic performance in cowpea crops that are sensitive to heat stress, an important breeding goal.
“This is my first poster award at an international conference. It was really exciting for me,” said Osei-Bonsu, who is a graduate student in the Kramer lab and at the Department of Plant Biology. “It is a good boost for my career and a sign of greater things to come, because I know I can improve on my presentations in the future. I can do better.”
“Isaac’s research requires that he master a wide range of highly technical methods and concepts, and apply them to both basic research questions and practical applications,” says Osei-Bonsu's doctoral advisor, David Kramer. “What’s remarkable is that Isaac was able to explain all this in a really engaging way, especially because the audience at the meeting came from very diverse backgrounds and many different countries.”
“Feed the Future” is a program funded by USAID under the U.S. government’s Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative. The program has been engaging universities, institutions and private organizations in the U.S., Africa and Central and South America to improve the quality and management of legumes, and contributing to the well-being of local people. Michigan State University is one of the leading institutions contributing research and new technologies to the world.
Osei-Bonsu obtained his BSc and MPhil degrees, both in botany, from the University of Ghana, graduating with First Class Honors degree for his BSc. He worked for close to three years with the CSIR-Crops Research Institute in Kumasi, Ghana before winning a Legume Innovation Lab Scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. with Kramer at MSU.