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The traditional view is that weeds weaken a crop. Shandrea Stallworth is trying to flip that script by studying a weed in hopes of strengthening cultivated rice.

Weedy rice, also known as red rice, stands up to environmental stressors like extreme heat, cold and submergence better than other rice. Stallworth hopes to unlock the genetic secrets of the weed in order to improve the state’s rice production.

“My goal is to identify traits within weedy rice in order to discover the genes associated with these traits that could help improve rice production across Mississippi,” Stallworth said.

The Biloxi native is pursuing a doctoral degree in weed science at Mississippi State. She earned her bachelor’s in plant science and biotechnology at Fort Valley State University and her master’s in plant breeding and genetics at Auburn University.

“I’ve always been interested in plant science because I want to help feed the growing world population,” she said.

As a recipient of a recent NASA fellowship, Stallworth hopes to share her passion for feeding the world with local high school students. She recently received a $20,000 NASA/Mississippi Space Grant Consortium Graduate Research Fellowship designed to help engineers and scientists of the future. The funding helps with her research and academics, as well as a K-12 outreach program she has designed.

In the program, Stallworth teaches high school students about food security and challenges them to solve global issues surrounding food security and the growing population through emerging technologies. She hopes to encourage these students to apply for the Mississippi Youth Institute where they have a chance to discuss global food challenges, win up to $500 in scholarship funds, and be recognized as a Norman E. Borlaug Scholar.

“I’m showing high school students, through technologies like 360-degree time-lapse videos and novel imaging systems, how rice responds to extreme temperature and other environmental stresses,” Stallworth said.

She said as an African American woman in STEM, she’s focused on showing young girls their own potential.

“As a minority, it’s important to me to show young African American women that they have a bright future in STEM. As I was growing up, I didn't see a lot of African American women in the science field, and one of my goals is to help change that.” 

In addition to the fellowship, Stallworth has received various accolades during her time at MSU.
She is an early career representative for the American Society of Plant Biology Science Policy Committee. She also placed first in the Ph.D. Graduate Research Poster Competition at the national Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Related Sciences, or MANRRS, conference. She received a Graduate Student Travel Award to attend the ASPB annual meeting in Hawaii in 2017 and was recently sponsored by Bayer Crop Science to attend the National Association for the State Departments of Agriculture policy meeting in the nation’s capital.