Category: Plant and Soil Sciences
Sweeping the Competition
October 09, 2025 Written by: Nya Wynn | Photos courtesy of: Qingwu Meng
Students working with University of Delaware faculty member Qingwu Meng, are not only growing leafy greens and flowers in their greenhouses, they’re also growing national recognition for their work.
The Meng lab specializes in controlled-environment agriculture (CEA), which refers to producing crops in indoor protected structures such as greenhouses, vertical farms or growth chambers. Their work can inform farmers on how they can more efficiently grow their crops, but it also earned members of the lab multiple wins at this year’s American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS) conference.
“In our lab, the Delaware Indoor Ag Lab (DIAL), we focus on how we can grow high-value specialty crops, including leafy greens, herbs and fruiting crops, but also floriculture plants such as petunia and chrysanthemum, more efficiently and sustainably using controlled environment technologies,” said Meng, assistant professor of controlled-environment horticulture..
The students that make up the award-winning lab range from undergraduates to graduate students to alumni. UD Class of 2025 plant science graduates Sarah Ding and Talia McCann placed second and third place respectively in the undergraduate poster competition.
Current plant science master’s student Harkirat Kaur Mashiana placed first in both the Three-Minute Lightning Talk Competition and the Controlled Environment Graduate Student Oral Competition, while fellow master’s student David Haule placed third in the Lightning Talk Competition.
Mashiana’s research focused on lettuce and how its growth is affected by changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide before and after transplanting. She was looking to find what she calls the “sweet spot,” at which the lettuce growth is optimized by the concentration of carbon dioxide.
“Though carbon dioxide is known to increase plant growth, the main aim at our lab is to kind of maximize resource use efficiency,” Mashiana said. “We found how we can minimize the use of carbon dioxide and get the best growth out of it. We also found the life stage at which you can enrich carbon dioxide to get the maximum growth of the lettuce.”
Although she presented alone, Mashiana credits a lot of her success to the mentorship and support provided by Meng.
“Dr. Meng really helped us fine-tune everything up until the very end,” she said. “We had periodic practice sessions with the entire lab and Dr. Meng, where we would give each other regular feedback. That really helped all of us to stand out.”
I feel very proud of them and I am extremely impressed by their hard work paying off on the national stage.
Assistant Professor of Controlled-Environment Horticulture
In addition to current UD students, Moein Moosavi, a Ph.D. candidate at North Carolina State University who interned with the Meng lab over the summer of 2024, also earned second place in the Controlled Environment Graduate Student Oral Competition.
His U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded project focused on preventing lettuce tipburn, a condition caused by calcium deficiency that leads to leaf edge burn.
“Tipburn can cause major crop losses and costs growers a lot of money,” Moosavi-Nezhad said. “To tackle this, we worked on a chemical biostimulant that enhances calcium mobilization in plants, testing the different concentrations of biostimulant both with and without vertical airflow fans to see how effective it was at preventing tipburn.”
Moosavi’s research could help improve small- to large-scale indoor and greenhouse producers who struggle with issues like tipburn, but lack the ability or technology to prevent humid conditions in greenhouses.
“Adding a small dose of biostimulant to the nutrient solution is much easier for small-scale growers,” Moosavi said. “But, at the same time, larger producers can also benefit since it cuts costs and makes lettuce production more reliable in tough conditions. Overall, I see it as a practical solution that can help a lot of different growers.”
While the students all won in individual competitions, both Meng and his mentees emphasized that the lab’s collaborative environment is what truly helps them excel as researchers and professionals.
“It's really nice to see blossoming professional relationships form among my lab members,” Meng said. “I also provide aspiring undergraduates with opportunities to conduct independent, publishable research. When we have lab meetings, they’re sitting at the same table with the graduate students so they can feel a sense of ownership and pride in their work and share their ideas.”
Meng is now working with Ding and McCann to get their results published, helping them with manuscript writing and submitting papers for publication. In addition to mentorship from Meng, the graduate students also helped to mentor the undergraduates.
“When I came to the lab, Dr. Meng trained me but we also helped train some undergraduates who were also working on the project,” Mashiana said. “This was also really helpful for my own learning because many of their questions were ones I hadn’t thought about before. But, once people started to ask me those, I better understood my own research.”
Although DIAL is equipped with state-of-the-art hydroponics systems, growth chambers for carbon dioxide experiments and LED lighting that enables indoor crop production without sunlight, Meng expressed that his students’ passion and dedication is truly what takes their lab to the next level.
“I feel very proud of them and I am extremely impressed by their hard work paying off on the national stage,” Meng said. “It shows their dedication and commitment, as well as all the effort that they put in, doing the experiments and going through to the end of it, presenting the final research and sharing that with the scientific community at the conference.”