Title: BGRI Announces first winners of Jeanie Borlaug Laube Women in Triticum Award

BGRI Announces first winners of Jeanie Borlaug Laube Women in Triticum Award
25 March 2010
This award, established in 2010, provides professional development opportunities for women working in wheat during the early stages of their career. The award is named after Jeanie Borlaug Laube, mentor to many, and daughter of Nobel Laureate Dr. Norman E. Borlaug.

Jeanie Borlaug Laube has served as Chair of the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative since October 2009. We received an impressive number of applications from highly qualified students and researchers working in wheat.

Meet the 2010 award winners, who will be honored at the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative Meeting in St. Petersburg in May.

Maricelis Acevedo, an early career pathologist specializing in the use of host resistance for control of cereal rusts, is currently a post doctoral fellow at the USDA-ARS, Aberdeen Idaho, working in the laboratory of John Bonman. Maricelis has screened wheat landraces from the USDA collection for stem rust resistance at the International screening nursery at Njoro Kenya for the past two years in order to identify new sources of resistance to the “Ug99” race and its variants.

Esraa Alwan is an MSc student studying under the supervision of Francis Ogbonnaya at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in association with Aleppo University in Syria. In St. Petersburg she will share her work looking for new sources of stem rust resistance in wild tetraploid wheat.

Jemanesh Kifetew Haile is a PhD student working with Marion Roder at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics & Crop Plant Research (IPK). Jemanesh is a native of Ethiopia, where Ug99 poses a great threat to Ethiopian farmers. Her work aims to identify molecular markers linked to the stem rust resistance QTLs that provide resistance to virulent races, such as TTKSK (or Ug99), in durum wheat.

Jessica Rutkoski is a first year Plant Breeding PhD student in the laboratory of Mark Sorrells at Cornell University. In St. Petersburg, Jessica will present her preliminary work using genomic selection methods to incorporate Adult Plant Resistance to Stem Rust in Adapted Germplasm.

Hale Ann Tufan is a PhD student working with Dr. Lesley Boyd at the John Innes Centre. Hale is characterizing the development of Magnaporthe spp. on wheat in order to better understand the function of WIR1, a potential basal resistance gene important against a broad range of pathogens.



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Article: newsroom132 (permalink)
Categories: :newsroom:March 2010
Date: March 25, 2010; 11:22:14 AM EDT
Author Name: John Bakum
Author ID: John