Maize Community Awards: Past Winners
| 2023 |
L. Stadler Mid-Career Award
The MGC is pleased to present the 2023 L. Stadler Mid-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. David Braun in recognition of his contributions in the genetic mechanisms of sugar transport, which opened a whole line of reserach into genetic control of sucrose export and interactions between functionally-related genes.
|
M. Rhoades Early-Career Award
The MGC is pleased to present the 2023 M. Rhoades Early-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Marna Yandeau-Nelson in recognition of her contributions in understanding the biosynthetic and regulatory genetic networks of metabolic traits, and using that knowledge for downstream practical applications.
|
Leadership Award
The MGC is pleased to present the 2023 Leadership Maize Genetics Award to Dr. John Fowler in recognition of his leadership as CODIE Chair that helped make the maize community more diverse and equitable, such as improving the MaGNET program, managing a workshop on increasing diversity in the community, and establishing a new tradition of having a diversity speaker at the maize meeting.
|
Cooperator Award
|
The MGC is pleased to present the 2023 Cooperator Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Carolyn Lawrence-Dill for her contributions in reinventing MaizeGDB to become a centralized resrouce for maize genetics around the B73 reference sequence.
|
|
The MGC is pleased to also present the 2023 Cooperator Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Bob Meeley in recognition of his development of the TUSC (Trait Utility System for Corn) at Pioneer Hi-Bred in the early 1990s, which was the premiere reverse-genetic tool in maize for decades until the application of CRISPR.
|
|
|
| 2022 |
L. Stadler Mid-Career Award
The MGC is pleased to present the 2022 L. Stadler Mid-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Jianbing Yan in recognition of his outstanding contributions in maize genetics and genomics.
|
M. Rhoades Early-Career Award
The MGC is pleased to present the 2022 M. Rhoades Early-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Madelaine Bartlett in recognition of her contributions in understanding the genetic and developmental mechanisms of the evolution of morphological diversity in plants.
|
Leadership Award
The MGC is pleased to present the 2022 Leadership Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Thelma Madzima in recognition of her leadership in advocating for diverse and equitable scientific communities.
|
Cooperator Award
|
The MGC is pleased to present the 2022 Cooperator Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Mary Schaeffer for her contribution in creating MaizeDB (with Ed Coe, 1991, became MaizeGDB in 2003), followed by 30 years of steadfast data curation, annotation and guidance.
|
|
The MGC is pleased to also present the 2022 Cooperator Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Candy Gardner in recognition of her tenure as Research Leader at the North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station in Ames, IA and ensuring that maize genetic resources and associated information were readily available to maize researchers globally.
|
|
|
| 2021 |
L. Stadler Mid-Career Award
The MGC is pleased to present the 2021 L. Stadler Mid-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Nathan Springer in recognition of his outstanding thought leadership and contributions to epigenetics research, maize genome structure, and gene expression regulation.
|
M. Rhoades Early-Career Award
The MGC is pleased to present the 2021 M. Rhoades Early-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Andrea Eveland in recognition of her significant research contributions through elegant studies of maize and related grasses, addressing complex biology with computational approaches.
|
Leadership Award
The MGC is pleased to present the 2021 Leadership Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Natalia de Leon in recognition of her impact on formalizing the MGC, leading large, cross-functional research initiatives, and her advocacy for underrepresented individuals and groups.
|
Cooperator Award
The MGC is pleased to present the 2021 Cooperator Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Marty Sachs in recognition of his dedication to the MGC by supporting, cataloging, and providing germplasm resources to the world and by serving on the Maize Genetics Meeting Steering Committee for over 20 years.
|
|
| 2020 |
L. Stadler Mid-Career Award
The MGEC is pleased to present the 2020 L. Stadler Mid-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Jim Holland. Dr. Holland received his Ph. D. in Crop Science from North Carolina State University and currently is a Research Geneticist for the USDA-ARS in the Plant Science Research Unit. Dr. Holland is an internationally-regarded plant geneticist known for his pioneering work in statistical genetics and plant breeding. His contributions to the field are numerous, including methods for calculating heritability and genetic and phenotypic correlations, breeding for resistance to fusarium ear rot (FER), and his contributions to the construction and use of the maize nested association mapping (NAM) population.
|
M. Rhoades Early-Career Award
The MGEC is pleased to present the 2020 M. Rhoades Early-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Matthew Hufford. Dr. Hufford received his Ph. D. in Ecology from University of California, Davis and currently is an Associate Professor at Iowa State University. Dr. Hufford's research investigates a wide array of topics in maize evolution from gene flow with wild relatives to comparative genomics. Some highlights of his research include a comprehensive population genetic analysis of maize domestication, substantial contributions in maize genome evolution and comparative genomics, benchmark tools for genome assemblies, and the assembly and annotation of the NAM founders.
|
|
| 2019 |
L. Stadler Mid-Career Award
The MGEC is pleased to present the 2019 L. Stadler Mid-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Marja Timmermans. Dr. Timmermans began her career at Cold Spring Harbor Lab in 1998, was named assistant professor in 2001, and professor in 2009. Since April of 2015 she has assumed the position of Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the University of Tübingen. Dr. Timmermans' work has contributed to our understanding of the role of small regulatory RNAs in the development of maize shoots including: small 21-bp miRNA seqeuences as proves for in situ hybridizations, rough sheath2 the role of POLYCOMB REPRESSIVE COMPLEX2 in the regulation of KNOTTED-like homeobox gene expression in maize shoots, and the mobility of miRNAs and ta-siRNAs.
|
M. Rhoades Early-Career Award
The MGEC is pleased to present the 2019 M. Rhoades Early-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Andrea Gallavotti. Dr. Gallavotti received his B.S. and Ph.D from the University of Milan in Italy. Dr. Gallavotti's work has contributed to our understanding of molecular mechanisms regulating plant and inflorescence architecture, including: transcriptional regulation in maize developmental pathways, auxin signaling and reproductive meristem development, and the importance of boron transport in inflorescense formation and fertility.
|
|
| 2018 |
L. Stadler Mid-Career Award
The MGEC is pleased to present the 2018 L. Stadler Mid-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Mike Scanlon. Dr. Scanlon received his Ph.D in Genetics from Iowa State University and was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley from 1993-1997. Dr. Scanlon's work has contributed to our understanding of meristem organization and function including: investigation of narrow sheath genes, analysis of the meristem transcriptome, and indentification of quantitative genetic variation for meristem morphology.
|
M. Rhoades Early-Career Award
The MGEC is pleased to present the 2018 M. Rhoades Early-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. James Schnable. Dr. Schnable obtained his B.A. from Cornell University and Ph.D from UC Berkeley. Dr. Schnable's work has contributed to our understanding of the consequences of genome duplication in maize including: the delineation of maize A and B sub-genomes, the discovery of sub-genome dominance, and the identification genes under selection by comparative analysis of maize and sorghum genomes.
|
|
| 2017 |
L. Stadler Mid-Career Award
The MGEC is pleased to present the 2017 L. Stadler Mid-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Paula McSteen. Dr. McSteen received her B.A. from the University of Dublin Trinity College and her Ph.D from the Plant Developmental Genetics University of East Anglia John Innes Center, Norwich, UK. Dr. McSteen's laboratory provided the first genetic evidence that auxin is synthesized from tryptophan in a two-step process in maize. Her lab has also contributed to two Plant Cell papers detailing the role of thiamine in maize development, and a particularly novel discovery that the element boron is involved with meristem development. With support from the NSF, she is currently collaborating with the Kellogg lab to understand the mechanism by which maize makes paired rows of kernels while other grasses such as wheat, rice, and barley make single rows. Her lab has identified a genetic mechanism for the development of a new meristem type through identification of a mutant defective in meristem maintenance. In addition to her research contributions, Dr. McSteen served on the steering committees for the Maize Genetics Conference from 2009-2012 and has served as treasurer from 2010-2017.
|
M. Rhoades Early-Career Award
The MGEC is pleased to present the 2017 M. Rhoades Early-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Candice Hirsch. Dr. Hirsch obtained her B.S. and Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her work uses genomics, classical genetics, and analysis of natural variation to characterize the genetic basis of phenotypic variation in maize, and applies that information to improving maize cultivars. She has been an author or co-author on 34 papers since 2010. Her research has included documenting maize presence-absence variation, and analyzing genetic variation associated with long-term selection for seed size. Her work on presence-absence variation included anaylsis of transcriptome variation in 500 maize inbred lines and she led the effort to perform a de novo assembly and analysis of PH207. This work, recently published at The Plant Cell highlights the variability in gene presence among maize inbred lines and will provide an extremely valuable resource for the analysis of how structural variation impacts gene expression and phenotype.
|
|
| 2016 |
L. Stadler Mid-Career Award
The MGEC is pleased to present the 2016 L. Stadler Mid-Career Maize Genetics Award to Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra. Dr. Ross-Ibarra obtained his BA and MS from UC Riverside and performed his PhD research at the University of Georgia. Dr. Ross-Ibarra was a post-doctoral researcher with Brandon Gaut at the University of California-Irvine. Dr. Ross-Ibarra has been a faculty member in the Department of Plant Sciences since 2009. His lab has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of population genetics and domestication, improvement and local adaptation in maize. Dr. Ross-Ibarra's group has been a part of over 40 publications since 2009. Dr. Ross-Ibarra has been awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers 2009 and the DuPont Young Professor Award 2012.
|
M. Rhoades Early-Career Award
The MGEC is pleased to present the 2016 M. Rhoades Early-Career Maize Genetics Award to Dr. Michael Gore. Dr. Gore received a BS and MS from Virginia Tech and performed his PhD research with Dr. Ed Buckler at Cornell University. Dr. Gore began his independent research career at the USDA Arid-Land Agricultural Research Center in Maricopa AZ 2009-2013 and then moved to the Plant Breeding and Genetics program at Cornell University as an Associate Professor in 2013. Dr. Gore has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of diversity and quantitative trait analysis in maize. He has a research program on basic and applied aspects of provitamin A carotenoid and vitamin E content in maize grain and is very active in the development and application of field-based plant phenotyping systems. He has received the National Association of Plant Breeders Early Career Scientist award in 2012 and the American Society of Plant Biologists Early Career award in 2013.
|
|
|
|
|
|
