By Ashley Stender | March 25, 2026

What does it mean to train scientists in a global research center?

In C-SPIRIT, that training does not happen in a single lab, or even within a single country. It takes place across institutions and different research systems, as trainees work together to move discoveries into real-world agricultural systems.

In C-SPIRIT, these trainees include postdoctoral scholars and graduate students working across partner institutions in the United States and Japan. They are early-career researchers contributing to active projects while developing the skills and experience needed to lead their own labs and research programs in the future, whether in academia, industry, or other sectors.

For Katherine Rivera-Zuluaga, a postdoctoral scholar in C-SPIRIT Director Sue Rhee’s lab at Michigan State University, that work reflects a broader shift in her own research experience, from field-based ecology to lab-based plant science and, now, toward more translational applications.

“What I like about the C-SPIRIT vision and mission is that it’s translational… we are actually trying to come up with a solution for the farmer,” she says.

Across the Center, trainees are developing technical skills and contributing to research that spans multiple stages of the scientific process, often across international teams.

From Discovery to Crops

C-SPIRIT trainees work on research that connects early-stage discovery with testing in plants and crops.

Rivera-Zuluaga’s work contributes to the discovery phase of this process, focusing on identifying antifungal compounds and supporting collaborators in finding molecules that may improve plant resilience under drought and heat stress.

The connection between discovery and application was also central to the experience of Kwangchul Shin and Shogo Kuwayama, who both work within Toshinori Kinoshita’s lab at Nagoya University and visited Michigan State University from September to November 2025. During their time at MSU, both worked on testing compounds identified in Japan using cropping systems in the United States.

“At MSU, I was able to extend this work to whole-plant and field-relevant conditions, which strengthened the translational aspect of my research,” Shin says.

Working across these systems gave them experience moving between controlled experimental conditions and plant-level validation, a transition that is often difficult to achieve within a single lab setting.

Research in Different Environments

For Shin and Kuwayama, working at MSU also meant adjusting to new research environments and experimental approaches.

“I was exposed to large-scale experimental setups… including greenhouse and field-based experiments,” Shin says.

Moving between lab-based experiments and greenhouse or field systems requires different tools, timelines, and experimental constraints. Conditions that can be tightly controlled in the lab become more variable in plant systems, requiring different approaches to experimental design and how results are interpreted.

Learning to navigate these differences is a key part of their development, especially when their work spans multiple stages of the research pipeline.

For Rivera-Zuluaga, that process also includes adapting to changes in technology.

“What I love about what I’m doing right now is seeing how the technology has made an advancement, and how easy it is to do what took me hours to do in the past,” she says.

Working Across Labs, Disciplines, and Teams

Working in C-SPIRIT means operating within a larger, more interconnected research environment.

“There’s a lot of communication skills… adapting to this much larger collaborative thing,” says Nicholas Schlecht, a postdoctoral scholar in Aim 1 Lead Ola Skirycz’s lab at Michigan State University.

Schlecht’s work centers on building and screening a diverse library of natural products, including compounds sourced from collaborators across C-SPIRIT and partner institutions. This involves coordinating with multiple labs to collect compounds and develop screening approaches to identify how these molecules interact with biological targets.

“You’re not just working in your own field, you’re interacting with people from different backgrounds… you’re not limited to your lab,” he explains.

Rivera-Zuluaga described a similar shift when working across disciplines. “You have to communicate your work in a way that people from other fields can understand,” she says.

These collaborations require coordination across labs, shared timelines, and the ability to integrate different types of expertise. For trainees, this represents a shift from working on individual projects to contributing to larger, interconnected efforts.

International Collaboration in Practice

For many trainees, one of the most defining aspects of C-SPIRIT is the opportunity to work in different national and research contexts.

“International collaboration allows researchers to combine diverse expertise, resources, and perspectives, which accelerates innovation and leads to more robust and widely applicable solutions,” Shin says.

Kuwayama saw how differences between research environments shape the work itself. “Climate conditions and the crops prioritized can differ significantly between countries such as the U.S. and Japan,” he says.

Being on site also changes how collaboration happens, making it easier to continue discussions and work through ideas in real time. “[It] enabled us to further explore ideas that we had not been able to fully discuss during online meetings,” Kuwayama says.

Much of that exchange happens through everyday interactions. “The most valuable part of my experience at MSU was the daily discussions with researchers and trainees,” Kuwayama says.

For Rivera-Zuluaga, working in an international team also brought a broader perspective on how people approach science. “As an outsider in the U.S., I learn a lot, and it reminds me that people have their own cultures and that we have to embrace them,” she says.

Seeing the Bigger Picture

As trainees gain experience across research systems and international collaborations, they begin to see their work differently.

“You have to think about how your work fits into the bigger picture,” Rivera-Zuluaga says, reflecting on how working within a large, multi-institutional center changes how individual projects are framed.

That shift is not only about scale, but about perspective. Instead of focusing on isolated experiments, trainees are working in environments where progress depends on how different pieces of research connect in the pipeline.

At the same time, C-SPIRIT’s emphasis on real-world impact shapes how that work is understood. “It does feel very translational… while still being academia,” Schlecht says.

Together, these experiences shape how trainees approach their work moving forward, from how they define research questions to how they collaborate across disciplines and institutions.

Looking Ahead

For Kuwayama, the experience will continue to shape how he approaches research moving forward. “I believe this experience will enable me to engage in more concrete and productive discussions, even while continuing my research in Japan,” he says.

Experiences like this are part of a broader exchange program within C-SPIRIT, where early-career researchers from partner institutions in Japan spend time in laboratories at Michigan State University, working alongside U.S.-based teams on crop stress resilience and metabolic engineering. 

In 2025, four visiting scholars including Kuwayama and Shin conducted research across multiple C-SPIRIT labs, testing compounds and evaluating plant responses using approaches ranging from plate-based assays to field-level imaging. This year, MSU will host additional C-SPIRIT trainees from Japan, building on this work through new research projects and lab placements.

As the program continues to expand, these exchanges are strengthening the Center’s international collaborations while shaping the next generation of scientists who will lead research across academia and industry.