(upbeat music) - I actually came to plant pathology when I was undergraduate.

I was a closet microbiologist at that time, I was geeked out on bacteria and kind of understanding at the genetic level, what they're doing to cause disease.

I work with a bacterial disease of apple and pear trees.

Called Erwinia amylovora, and this pathogen causes significant disease on these trees called fireblight.

Hi Rashmi, how's it going?

- Good, how are you?

- I'm good.

We work both at the lab and field levels for this disease.

In the lab, we study the genetics of the interactions with the host.

So how does this bacterial pathogen reprogram the host to cause disease?

And then in the field, we study the biology of the pathogen.

How does this pathogen grow on plants?

This pathogen can infect through apple flowers.

Eventually just migrates down through the tree, to the roots where it kills the roots and kills the tree.

The work we do is important on many levels.

This disease occurs in almost all apple growing, pear growing regions of the world.

So that's a huge impact.

It's not only killing trees, expecting a grower's livelihood.

The fireblight is ravaging through the farm.

They're losing thousands of trees.

It's always devastating to me to see the look on the growers face when we're looking at their trees and you can see hundreds of trees and I'm going to tell them they have to remove, and there's just no recovery for the tree.

That's the worst part of my job, but it's also a part of the job where I get a one-on-one with growers and we can talk about solutions.

- This is a Nicola and the rest are armenia.

- I teach a graduate student class and I enjoy teaching because I just enjoy imparting what I know about plant bacteriology to students, an area that I'm really interested in and see them get interested in that topic.

I really enjoy that.

That makes a difference to me.

(upbeat music)