Newsletter - Spring 2008

Awards

Ben Houlton collecting fog water in a
Hawaiian rainforest, where clouds represent
the major path of nitrogen input to the system.

Ben Houlton: Best Paper by a Junior Scientist.
Assistant Professor of Terrestrial Biogeochemistry Ben Houlton received the Gene E. Likens Award from the Ecological Society of America at their annual meeting in August 2007 for the Best Paper by a Junior Scientist in the Biogeosciences.  His winning paper, entitled “Isotopic evidence for large gaseous nitrogen losses from tropical rainforests,” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June 2006. 

Ben Houlton: Andrew Mellon Award.
Dr. Houlton was also the recent recipient of a prestigious award from the Andrew Mellon Foundation to support an ecological research and training program led by a junior faculty scientist. The $290,000 award will be used to support Ben’s incoming graduate students and their research.

Ted Hsiao: American Society of Agronomy Honorary Membership and an honorary doctorate!
Professor Emeritus of Hydrologic Sciences Ted Hsiao was selected to receive the 2007 American Society of Agronomy Honorary Membership award.  This special honor is a career award, recognizing Dr. Hsiao’s accomplishments in plant physiological response to environmental stresses.  Dr. Hsiao was also awarded an honorary doctorate in 2005 from the University of Leida, Spain, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the agrarian engineering profession for his contributions to the science underlying agriculture.

Marion Adams (L) and Brittany Smith (R).

LAWR Undergrads Receive the 2007 Howard Walton Clark Prize in Plant Breeding and Soil Building.
Brittany Smith and Marion Adams were both working in LAWR labs when they received this award for outstanding undergraduates, which comes with a $5000 honorarium.  

Smith was a student assistant in Professor Louise Jackson’s Soil and Root Ecology lab, where she worked on a variety of studies on organic agriculture and soil ecology.  After graduating in September 2007, she is now working for Professor Will Horwath on agricultural runoff and water quality at the Sustainable Agricultural Farming Systems (SAFS) project.

Adams was working with Professor Wendy Silk at the time of the award, before graduating in June 2007.  Their project investigated the role of root border cells in the rhizosphere carbon balance.  She is now Dr. Jackson’s lab manager, and is busy writing a paper on conservation tillage and assisting with field work on agricultural riparian restoration.

Both recipients plan to pursue graduate school in the future.

Thomas Harter: Kevin J. Neese Award from the Groundwater Resources Association of California.
Dr. Thomas Harter and the UCCE Groundwater Hydrology Program received the 2007 Kevin J. Neese award from the Groundwater Resources Association of California.  The UCCE Groundwater Program was chosen “in recognition of its efforts to engage scientists, regulators, farm advisors, dairy industry representatives, and dairy farmers to better understand the effects of dairy operations on water quality”.  For more info, visit http://grac.org/awards2007.asp

Wendy Silk: invited professor in France!
Dr. Wendy Silk, Professor of Water Science and Quantitative Plant Biologist, was awarded a prestigious appointment as an invited professor by the Université Blaise Pascal and the INRA (French national research institute for agriculture and the environment) in March 2008. As invited international professor, she gave a series of talks relating her work on growth kinematics to the French programmatic themes “genes to ecology” and “functional biology in the environment.” She participated in an interdisciplinary workshop on robustness and resilience in biology, and addressed research groups in Clermont-Ferrand, Montpellier, Versailles, and Paris.