Joshua Kaste
Postdoctoral Research Associate
University of Illinois
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois, where I work in Dr. Megan Matthews group building and analyzing metabolic models of nitrogen fixation and nutrient exchanges between plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. I plan on using mathematical descriptions of these metabolic processes and inter-species exchanges to quantify the costs and benefits in terms of carbon, energy, and ultimately crop yields, associated with the aims of and biotechnological strategies being developed by the ENSA project.
Prior to joining Dr. Matthews group, I did my Ph.D in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Michigan State University with Dr. Yair Shachar-Hill. During my doctoral studies, I developed new methods for using omic datasets to improve metabolic flux predictions in photosynthetic metabolism models (Kaste et al 2023), worked on predictive metabolic modeling to inform synthetic biology efforts in electroactive bacteria (Ford et al 2022), and built kinetic models describing carbon-concentrating mechanisms (Kaste et al 2024; Steensma et al 2024). Analysis I performed on isotopic labeling data in the oilseed crop Camelina sativa helped discover the role of vacuolar sugars in recycling carbon back into the Calvin-Benson cycle in photosynthesizing leaves (Xu et al 2022). I have also worked on characterizing the effectiveness of Topological Data Analysis techniques for visualizing and understanding large cross-species RNA-seq datasets (Palande et al 2023). Finally, I developed educational resources for teaching kinetic and constraint-based metabolic modeling techniques, in the interest of both making the techniques used in my area of research accessible to a broader audience (Kaste et al 2023).
Before my graduate studies, I did my undergraduate degree in Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University. I did research at Cornell and at the Noble Research Institute on fungal pathogens and endophytes during that time (Yi et al 2018).