Kudos
Dr. Barry Swanson has been appointed as the Interim Director of the School of Food Science.
Rita Abi-Ghanem, Soil Science doctoral candidate, received a scholarship to participate in the Association for International Agriculture and Rural Development annual conference and Future Leaders Forum held June 1-3, 2009 in Washington, D.C. There are hundreds of applicants and only 12 students are selected in a double-blind review. She met with heads of Food and Agricultural Organization, World Bank, and other prominent international development groups regarding sustainable development and food security, a topic of her Ph.D. dissertation.
Dr. Kulvinder Gill and his team have co-authored a paper entitled “Rapid and Targeted Introgression of Genes into Popular Wheat Cultivars Using Marker-Assisted Background Selection” which was accepted for publication in PLoS ONE journal and is now available online at http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0005752. This new methodology introduces an optimized approach in marker-assisted selection where 97% or more of a recurrent parent genome can be recovered in only two backcross generations, a significant improvement over current practice. Read more in this On Solid Ground article:
http://lyris.cahnrs.wsu.edu/read/archive?id=178495
Jasdeep S. Mutti, postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, was awarded second place in the graduate student/postdoc oral presentations at the National Wheat Genomics Conference held in Indianapolis, Indiana, December 2008. Mutti is a member of Dr. Kulvinder Gill’s team. Gill holds the Vogel Wheat Breeding and Genetics Endowed Chair position at WSU.