Christina was born and raised in Tantallon Nova Scotia, a rural area just 20 minutes outside the city Halifax. Her enthusiasm for plants led her to pursue many outdoor activities during her childhood and high school career and inevitably led to her enrolling in the Biology department at Dalhousie University in the fall of 2003. Following the completion of her honours program in May 2008 in the Gunawardena programmed cell death (PCD) lab Christina was awarded the Sarah Lawson Botanical Research Scholarship and continued her work into the summer months. Christinas’ passion for the research being completed on the novel model organism, the lace plant, led her to begin her MSc work in the fall of 2008; she is now a PhD student in the lab and a holder of an NSERC PGS-D. Christina’s work mainly involves determining the role of the mitochondria during both regulated and induced PCD within the lace plant, with a second large focus on elucidating the order of all cellular/organelle events during this cell death process. Christina is also highly active within her discipline and has been the student representative for the Canadian Botanical Association for the past two years. This year Christina was also awarded The Taylor A. Steeves Award for best paper in plant development from the same society, for her publication in The Americas Journal of Plant Science and Biotechnology in 2010. Outside of research Christinas’ true passion is teaching, she is currently completing her diploma in teaching in learning in higher education from Dalhousie, and this year was presented the TA of the year award for her exemplary teaching abilities.

Christina Lord, PhD candidate
Gunawardena Laboratory
Dalhousie University
Biology Department
Life Sciences Centre,
1355 Oxford Street,
Halifax, NS B3H 4J1
Canada
Tel: (902) 494-1594