After being awarded a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), Tropical Plant and Soil Science student Elizabeth Winnicki presented her work on the “Genetic Diversity of ‘Uala (Sweet Potato) in Hawai‘i” in Montreal, Canada, at the 2018 Plant Biology Conference hosted by the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB). She explored 116 different varieties of sweet potato, identifying three main groups in the sample: Hawaiian varieties, outgroups (other species), and USDA (mainland) and Herbarium (museum) samples. She showed that the Hawaiian varieties initially brought by Polynesians some 900 years ago appear to be unique populations that have been to a large extent maintained.