Professor
College of Letters & Science l Department of Botany
Dr. Simon Gilroy is a professor in the Botany Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research is on how plants sense and respond to their environment. He works extensively with NASA on understanding how plants grow on the International Space Station and plans for using plants in life support on planetary bases.
Dr. Gilroy’s talk “Are Your Plants Really Listening to You” was absolutely fascinating, engaging, well geared to his audience’s expertise and experience and sparked some of the most interesting questions and discussion post-talk that our group has ever experienced. Kudos to Dr Gilroy!!!! And thank you so very much, Dr Gilroy, for making your research and your vast wealth of knowledge available to our group.
– Susan Ecroyd, West Side Garden Club
Talks:
Plants in Space: Why is There Plant Research on the International Space Station?
NASA has a long history of partnering with university plant researchers to understand how plants respond to growing in space. The talk will cover the kinds of plant research going on in space and some of the recent work from UW-Madison. We will cover what problems we still need to solve, whether plants need gravity to grow normally and how close we are to using plants in a bioregenerative life support system to provide food and replenish the air in long-term spaceflight.
Approximate length of talk: 20 to 45 minutes