Nazmin Akter is a PhD student in the Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) Lab in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California, Davis, USA, under the supervision of Dr. Laura Cammarisano and Dr. Md. Shamim Ahamed. Her research focuses on developing practical and sustainable stress-hardening strategies to improve transplant resilience and crop establishment in processing tomato production. California produces more than 90% of the processing tomatoes grown in the United States, and successful crop establishment is critical to maintaining productivity, especially during early-spring planting when seedlings are often subject to suboptimal temperatures. Nazmin’s doctoral research aims to develop and validate chilling-hardening protocols that enhance seedling resilience, improve transplant establishment, increase tolerance to post-transplant environmental stress and reduce energy costs associated with nighttime heating in the nursery greenhouse.
Initial studies were conducted to evaluate the effects of exposing tomato seedlings to night temperatures of 12 and 5°C for 10 consecutive nights during the nursery stage. Measurements were carried out on morphological parameters, chlorophyll content, membrane stability, chlorophyll fluorescence, stomatal conductance and root development. The preliminary results showed that chilling temporarily reduced shoot growth and physiological performance, but the seedlings recovered after 10 days under optimal conditions. Seedlings exposed to moderate chilling (12°C) developed longer roots during recovery and maintained a more compact canopy with fewer leaves, characteristics that may improve compatibility with automated transplanting systems and enhance transplant performance.
Nazmin Akter won the ISHS Young Minds Award for the best poster presentation at the XVIII International Symposium on Processing Tomato in USA in June 2026. She also received the Adopt-a-Scientist Travel Award sponsored by The Morning Star Company and the California Tomato Research Institute (CTRI) to attend the symposium.
