Sreenath Palle, graduate research assistant, will attend Pathways to the Doctorate programmaticconference in southern Texas. The Texas A&M University System developed the program to advance higher education opportunities, and, perhaps even more important, awareness of those opportunities in all regions of the state. The conferences rotate among System institutions, and the Pathways program thereby takes advantage of its nine universities (>100K students) to find and foster pursuit of doctorate degrees by talented individuals from most of the state, including large regions where the challenges and opportunities socio-economic development at greatest. Involvement of the Fiber Genomics with the Pathways program is particularly good fit, as the crop is grown throughout many regions of the state, so the subject matter will be of wide interest.