Hua Lu,Associate Professor of University of Maryland Baltimore County. She exploit the powerful model system Arabidopsis thaliana in her investigations of mechanisms of plant innate immunity. Arabidopsis is a small herbaceous plant that can be easily grown within limited space. It has a short life cycle and extremely well characterized genetics. In addition, Arabidopsis has a relatively small, fully sequenced genome, and can be easily manipulated at the physiological, genetic and molecular levels. As all higher plants are believed to share similar innate immunity, knowledge on defense mechanisms obtained from Arabidopsis can be readily applied to other plants and enable us to better control diseases in agriculturally important crops.