Texas Tech University

Kevin Cushman

Research Assistant/ Greenhouse and Lab Manager
Photo Description

About

I have always been involved with agriculture. My grandfather was a potato farmer in Northern Maine. I was six year old when I first started working in the fields. In high school, I transitioned to the blueberry barrens of Downeast Maine, but it wasn't until I started my own plant nursery years later that I began to gain an appreciation for the complex processes of plant growth and development, and responses to their environments. It was this curiosity that inspired me to finish my undergraduate degree at the University of Maine. During this time, I began working in a molecular systematics lab and continued after graduating. A year later I joined the lab as a graduate student studying the morphological and molecular relationships of plants in the genus Amelanchier that are complicated taxonomically by hybridization, polyploidy, and apomixis. Post graduation, after a brief stint managing a commercial nursery, I joined the de los Reyes lab. With the hard work ethic of a farm boy, several years of management and commercial nursery work, and research involving genetically complex organisms, these are the experiences I bring to our new challenge: unraveling genetic, genomic, and epigenomic pathways that confer salinity and dehydration tolerance in Upland Cotton.

Skills

Mad pipetting skills and other refined research and growing talents.

Publications

  1. Cushman, K. R., M. B. Burgess, E. T. Doucette, G. A. Nelson, and C. S. Campbell. In press. Species Delimitation in Tetraploid, Apomictic Amelanchier (Rosaceae). Systematic Botany.
  2. Campbell, C. S., M. B. Burgess, E. T. Doucette, and K. R. Cushman. In press. Amelanchier. In New Manual of Vascular Plants of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada, eds. R. F. C. Naczi, J. R. Abbott, and Collaborators. Online edition of 2017. New York: NYBG Press.
  3. Burgess, M. B., K. R. Cushman, E. T. Doucette, C. T. Frye, and C. S. Campbell. 2015. Understanding diploid diversity: A first step in unraveling polyploid, apomictic complexity in Amelanchier (Rosaceae). American Journal of Botany 102: 2041-2057.
  4. Burgess, M. B., K. R. Cushman, E. T. Doucette, N. Talent, C. T. Frye, and C. S. Campbell. 2014. Effects of apomixis and polyploidy on diversification and geographic distribution in Amelanchier (Rosaceae). American Journal of Botany 101: 1375-1387.
  5. Campbell, C. S., M. B. Burgess, K. R. Cushman, E. T. Doucette, A. C. Dibble, and C. T. Frye. 2014. Amelanchier. Pp. 646-661 in Flora of North America volume 9. Magnoliophyta: Rosidae (in part): Rosales (in part), ed. FNA Editorial Committee. New York: Oxford University Press.