Honors and Awards

Kathryn Boor, professor of food science, has been honored with both the DeLaval Dairy Extension Award from the American Dairy Science Association and the New York State Association for Food Protection’s William V. Hickey Award for outstanding service in the field of food sanitation.

Rich Curtis, senior lecturer in finance in Applied Economics and Marketing, was voted a favorite professor by Cornell students surveyed as part of BusinessWeek's 2006 undergraduate business-school rankings. He was profiled in a feature article in the October 3, 2006 issue of the magazine.

A team led by André Dhondt, the Edwin H. Morgens Professor of Ornithology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and director of Bird Population Studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, has received a $2.5 million grant to study house finch eye disease. The award follows an earlier grant of almost $2.5 million for research on house finches and M. gallisepticum. The grants are from the "Ecology of Infectious Diseases Program," a joint National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and U.S. Geological Survey program designed to study ecology and infectious diseases.
http://www.cals.cornell.edu/public/comm/news/dhondt-nsf-award.cfm

Jeff Hancock, assistant professor of communication and a member of the faculty of computing and information science, recently received a $680,000 National Science Foundation grant to pursue "The Dynamics of Digital Deception in Computer Mediated Environments." Hancock will collaborate with Claire Cardie, associate professor of computer science and the Charles and Barbara Weiss Director of the information science program, who has worked with the Department of Homeland Security on separating fact from fiction, and Mats Rooth, professor of linguistics, who also is a member of Cornell's information science program. The three will try to create a language-based approach to detecting lies.
http://www.cals.cornell.edu/cals/public/comm/news/hancock.cfm

Dan Luo, assistant professor of biological and environmental engineering, has garnered a prestigious 2006 Faculty Early Career Development Program award from the National Science Foundation. Luo will use most of the five-year, $400,000 grant to fund one graduate and one undergraduate student to work with him on nucleic acid engineering research. The balance will fund materials and supplies as well as travel costs for the students to attend professional conferences.

Luo's research centers around integrating DNA into biomaterials by using DNA to construct new materials and nanodevices. His work, he explains, deviates from the traditional concept of DNA as a genetic material, and instead uses DNA as a generic building block for the construction of biomaterials with biomedical and biotechnical applications.

In addition, DNANO Systems, a company that Luo co-founded to commercialize his research, has won a prize from Purdue University for its life sciences-related business plan. The prize carries a $20,000 cash award for the company, plus $8,000 for in-kind legal and business services. Last year DNANO Systems received $500,000 in seed money from NYSTAR. The company will be among those housed in the business incubator in the Life Sciences Technology Building, which is now rising on the central Cornell campus.
http://www.cals.cornell.edu/cals/public/comm/news/dan-luo-nsf-award.cfm

Peter Smallidge, senior extension associate in the Department of Natural Resources, has been elected a fellow of the Society of American Foresters. Smallidge, who joined the Cornell faculty in 1996, is the state extension forester responsible for forest management and stewardship, forest ecology, landowner education, and vegetation management.

Harold van Es, professor of soil and water management in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, has received the 2006 Fellow Award from the American Society of Agronomy. His research, extension, and teaching responsibilities focus on soil physical quality, chemical fate and transport, precision agriculture, and pedometrics. He teaches an undergraduate course in soil and water management and a graduate course in applications of space-time statistics. He also received the Fellow Award from the Soil Science Society of America in 2004.

Research support specialist Mary Jean Welser was recently named the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station’s Outstanding Employee for 2006. Welser, who currently has split appointments in Horticultural Sciences and Plant Pathology, began her career at the experiment station as a student summer helper in 1975.

Department of Education professor Arthur Wilson and his colleague from the University of Georgia, Ronald Cervero, have received the 2006 Cyril O. Houle Award for Literature in Adult Education from the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education. Their book, Working the Planning Table: Negotiating Democratically for Adult, Continuing, and Workplace Education, was published this year.

Milton Zaitlin, professor emeritus of plant pathology, has received the Award of Distinction from the American Phytopathological Society. This occasional recognition for career achievement is the society’s highest award.

Zaitlin discovered that plants could be made resistant to plant viruses by transformation with replicase sequences, a significant finding that led to several patents.

He was named a fellow of the American Phytopathological Society in 1978. He has been a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1969 and held Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships in 1966-67.

The second annual CALS Research and Extension Awards were presented at a November ceremony held jointly with the College of Human Ecology and Cornell Cooperative Extension. CALS honored three faculty members and an extension team.

Gary Bergstrom, professor of plant pathology, received the CALS award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Applied Research. Bergstrom, who joined the faculty in 1981, is widely recognized and respected by small-grains researchers nationally and internationally as an authority on diseases of small grains, especially soilborne viruses and fungal leaf and head blights. His work on Fusarium head blight, a major production problem for New York wheat growers, led to greatly improved methods for evaluating resistance of wheat genotypes. He also played a leading role internationally in the study of brown root rot of alfalfa.

Bergstrom co-developed two disease-resistant wheat germplasms, two registered wheat cultivars, and an antagonistic bacterium, Bacillus subtilis, with commercial potential for biocontrol of plant diseases. With Mark Sorrells, the current chair of Plant Breeding and Genetics, he published the first study mapping genes for resistance to wheat spindle streak mosaic virus. Together they identified winter wheat cultivars and lines with resistance to scab, a serious threat to food safety.

Kenneth Kemphues, a professor and associate chair in Molecular Biology and Genetics and a member of the CALS faculty since 1984, was recognized for Outstanding Accomplishments in Basic Research. Using the soil nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a research model, Kemphues has conducted pioneering work in the area of cell polarity, discovering and characterizing the first four par genes—currently one of the most intensely studied areas in the world—and placing them in a functional pathway to provide a robust framework for understanding how cells set up asymmetry in the earliest stages of embryonic development.

His second major contribution came from the creative and careful experimentation and observation of his former graduate student, Su Guo, whose contributions to the discovery of RNA interference were recognized earlier this year as leading to the 2006 Nobel Prize in Medicine for Andrew Fire and Craig Mello.

Kemphues has also served Cornell as director of graduate studies and currently serves as an associate editor of Genetics and as a member of the editorial board of Molecular Biology of the Cell.

Gerald White, professor of applied economics and management, received the CALS Career Accomplishment Award. A member of the CALS faculty since 1978, White conducts extension programs and applied research in business management and economics of horticultural crops, focusing on economic analyses of orchard, vineyard, and greenhouse production systems and the economic outlook for the fruit, grape, and wine industries. He also works with universities and research institutes in central and eastern Europe on a collaborative initiative, Sustainable Development of Rural Communities, and co-chairs the Central and Eastern European Program Committee in CALS. He has advised 49 graduate students and untold numbers of undergraduates.

And the New York FarmNet team was this year’s recipient of the award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Extension/Outreach. Team members include: Rachel Bothwell, program assistant; Steve Bulkley, DVM, extension associate and business planning specialist; Wayne Knoblauch, professor and faculty advisor; Karen Mastronardi, extension associate and director of human services; Steve Richards, senior extension associate and program director; and Ed Staehr, extension associate and director of communications.

Since the establishment of NY FarmNet 20 years ago, the program has responded to over 31,000 requests for assistance via an 800 helpline that links farm families with free, confidential consulting, both personal and financial. Consultants have assisted over 14,500 farm families in getting through difficult financial and personal challenges. A new program, FarmLink, was established in 2003 to help farms transfer management and ownership to the next generation. The program has helped facilitate 57 farm transfers since its inception.