Two conference award winners recognise APPN support

APPN congratulates two notable award winners from the Australian Society of Plant Scientists (ASPS) and International Biometric Society (Australasian Region) conferences in November 2025.

Firstly, 2024 APPN Postgraduate Internship Award recipient Louise Walker, from La Trobe University, earned Best Student Presentation during the ASPS Conference at Flinders University in Adelaide. 

Louise gave her presentation on the effects of independent and combined heat and drought on development, grain yield and protein concentration in faba bean (Vicia faba) which included findings from the experiments she conducted during her internship at APPN’s Adelaide Node, The Plant Accelerator®. 

By subjecting a common faba bean variety to mild, yet prolonged heat, drought, and combined stressors during the reproductive period, Louise showed that yield losses were greatest under heat stress, with heat impacting pod emergence while drought tended to trigger pod abortion. 

Greater understanding of these fundamental yield and protein determination mechanisms will help in the development of high yielding, high protein varieties for future farming conditions. 

Louise says that while intense, short-term heat and drought conditions are relatively easy to generate, growing and maintaining the 192 plants under highly controlled mild stress conditions would not have been possible without access to the twin DroughtSpotter rooms at TPA®. 

Meanwhile, Clayton Forknall, a Senior Biometrician at TPA®, was joint winner of the Student Speaker Award at IBS(AR)’s ‘Biometrics in the Bush Capital’ conference held in Canberra. 

His presentation discussed the novel incorporation of a mathematical technique for modelling non-smooth trends into linear mixed model frameworks – the workhorse of agricultural statistical analysis. This innovation comes from work he has been doing as part of his PhD in applied statistics. 

Clayton illustrated the new method by giving an example from a mass spectrometry experiment investigating the proteome of barley malt.

“A big thank you to The Plant Accelerator® and APPN for supporting my travel to the Conference,” Clayton said. 

“Attending was a valuable opportunity to network with other statisticians, build connections for future collaborative projects, and keep pace with recent advances in applied statistics.

It was also a good platform to showcase, share and promote APPN’s involvement in developing new statistical methods with the Australian and international statistical community.”

APPN is proud to have supported Louise and Clayton and we congratulate them both on their success.

We certainly look forward to seeing what more they will achieve in their future efforts to advance plant science, resilience and productivity. 

20 January 2026