UQ student lab exchange: Zsa Zsa Boyny

From late September until mid-December 2025, PhD student Zsa Zsa Boyny from JLU's second IRTG student cohort spent three months at the University of Queensland in the research group of Prof. Mark Cooper, under the supervision of Dr. Owen Powell.

During her exchange, Zsa Zsa advanced her simulation work modeling the impact of increased recombination on breeding outcomes, expanding it from purely additive models. She especially benefited from Owen's close supervision and his extensive experience with stochastic simulations across a wide variety of settings, enabling rapid improvements in her simulation work. Additionally, the insights in the work of other group members, such as the Arabidopsis experimental breeding program and the matching of "digital twins" to the breeding program, helped her to improve her skills – both in the climate chamber and in coding, and further expanding her horizons beyond crops to model plants.

The visit also enabled valuable collaborative exchanges with the research groups of Dr. Karen Massel and Dr. Eric Dinglasan, connecting different approaches to recombination in plant breeding – from haplotype block-specific recombination to genome editing strategies aimed at increasing recombination rates. Especially during a recombination workshop, she exchanged approaches and discussed challenges and advancements in the field, leading to the development of collaborative ideas with Nicholas Lester, an IRTG student under Karen's supervision who will undertake a lab exchange at JLU in the coming year.

Zsa Zsa further expanded her professional network through participation in the Q-Retreat and the UQ ARSA Next Gen Ag Symposium 2025, deepening her engagement with current developments in agricultural research. The insights and collaborations established during this exchange will directly inform Zsa Zsa's ongoing research into overcoming linkage drag in sorghum.