Mapping the Plant Ionome: Meet 2026 William T. Kemper Fellow Magdalena Janik

Growing up in Głogów, Poland, Magdalena Janik was drawn to the natural world from an early age. Her mother gardened in the backyard, and after the family moved to the countryside when Magdalena was 12, fields surrounded their home. She rescued injured birds, examined insects around the backyard pond, rode horses, and filled her time with questions about living things. That pull toward understanding how living things work eventually carried her thousands of miles from home.

At 14, Magdalena visited Minnesota through an exchange program. A few years later, she asked her mother what it would take to attend college in the United States. Together, they spent nearly two years navigating testing, applications, and language requirements. Magdalena enrolled at Canisius University in Buffalo, New York. She was determined: "I'm going to go to the U.S. all by myself, and I'm going to make it!"

Today, Magdalena is a fifth-year PhD student in the Plant & Microbial Biosciences program at Washington University in St. Louis and a member of the lab of Danforth Center Principal Investigator Ivan Baxter, PhD. In 2026, she received the 2026 William T. Kemper Fellowship, which recognizes outstanding PhD students whose research demonstrates great promise for advancing plant science.

Finding Her Place in Science

Magdalena originally planned to study animal behavior and dreamed of working with animals. But an undergraduate biology professor saw something more. "He told me, 'I think you have the spark in you to work in a lab,'" Magdalena recalls. She was intimidated, but took his advice, added biology as a second major, and began working in a microbiology lab as a freshman. She quickly discovered that research was where she belonged.

That sense of belonging deepened when, after several graduate-school lab rotations, she joined Baxter's lab at the Danforth Center. "Ivan did a guest lecture, and I really enjoyed who he is and the science he does," she says. "He made me feel passionate about it as well."

What Makes a Plant Thrive?

Magdalena's research tackles a deceptively simple question: Which genes control how plants take up, move, and store elements?

Scientists call the collective elemental makeup of a plant its ionome. Plants must maintain the right balance: taking in nutrients they need while managing potentially toxic elements. Understanding the genes that control that process could have enormous implications for agriculture, human nutrition, and the environment.

Magdalena combines computational biology with hands-on experiments. Using a tool developed in the Baxter Lab, she compares genetic data across plant species to identify genes most likely to influence elemental traits. Then she tests those predictions in plants. The approach could eventually help scientists develop crops with more essential micronutrients, addressing "hidden hunger" among people who consume enough calories but still lack key nutrients. It could also help create plants capable of growing in contaminated soils, or even removing toxic elements such as cadmium and arsenic from the environment.

The same elemental questions have pulled Magdalena's attention beyond Earth. She's interested in astrobiology (the study of life in the context of space) and sees a natural link to her own work: if scientists can understand how plants manage elements here, that knowledge could inform how plants might be adapted to the very different chemical environments beyond Earth.

For Baxter, that combination of scientific range and purpose makes Magdalena stand out. "Magdalena is the type of scientist that Bill Danforth wanted to bring to St. Louis when he founded the Danforth Center: intelligent, enthusiastic, and interested in using plant sciences to improve the world," he says. Her research, Baxter adds, has the potential "to improve the nutritional quality of our food and improve our ability to grow crops on marginal lands with less fertilizer."

From a backyard pond in Poland to questions about plants on other worlds, Magdalena has kept looking closer at how living things work and closer at how that understanding might solve challenges here on Earth and beyond.