On 1 April 2015, Fay-Wei defended his thesis
Seeing the Light: The Origin and Evolution of Plant Photoreceptors
and WOWED his Dissertation Committee: Kathleen M. Pryer, Chair, Meng Chen and Sönke Johnsen (Duke); Corbin Jones (UNC, Biology); Sarah Mathews (Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research, Australia).
Dr. Li is now working as a “double postdoc” at UC-Berkeley and Duke on fern genomics! Stay tuned…
His 3 dissertations chapters are already all published:
Li, F.-W., C.J. Rothfels, M. Melkonian, J.C. Villarreal, D.W. Stevenson, S.W. Graham, G.K.-S. Wong, S. Mathews, and K.M. Pryer. 2015. The origin and evolution of phototropins. Frontiers in Plant Science 6: 637. doi:10.3389/fpls.2015.00637
Li, F.-W., M. Melkonian, C.J. Rothfels, J.C. Villareal, D.W. Stevenson, S.W. Graham, G.K.-S. Wong, K.M. Pryer, and S. Mathews. 2015. Phytochrome diversity in green plants and the origin of canonical plant phytochromes. Nature Communications 6: 7852.
Li, F.-W., J.C. Villarreal, S. Kelly, C.J. Rothfels, M. Melkonian, E. Frangedakis, M. Ruhsam, E.M. Sigel, J.P. Der, J. Pittermann, D.O. Burge, L. Pokorny, A. Larsson, T. Chen, S. Weststrand, P. Thomas, E. Carpenter, Y. Zhang, Z. Tian, L. Chen, Z. Yan, Y. Zhu, X. Sun, J. Wang, D.W. Stevenson, B.J. Crandall-Stotler, A.J. Shaw, M.K. Deyholos, D.E. Soltis, S.W. Graham, M.D. Windham, J.A. Langdale, G. K.-S. Wong, S. Mathews, and K.M. Pryer. 2014. Horizontal transfer of an adaptive chimeric photoreceptor from bryophytes to ferns. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 111: 6672-6677.