UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences lauded outstanding accomplishments in research during the college’s inaugural Research Awards Ceremony, held Oct. 25 at the Hintz Family Alumni Center on the University Park campus.
“As a land-grant institution, research is fundamental to our mission, providing discoveries and solutions to some of the most critical problems facing agriculture and the environment,” said Dean Rick Roush. “We celebrate the people who make, enable and share those discoveries for the benefit of society in crop breeding, human and community dynamics, environmental impacts from climate change, food safety, climate markets, and other fields.”
Blair Siegfried, associate dean for research and graduate education, noted that over the past three years, the college’s faculty have collaborated to publish more than 700 unique refereed journal articles annually.
“Supporting this research, we are also seeing a steady rise in the success of our faculty seeking extramural funding,” Siegfried said. “Last year, our faculty participated in external awards amounting to more than $135 million. Of that total, they are receiving $71 million to directly support their research programs. This represents a new record for our college and exceeds our high point in 2020.”
Alex and Jessie C. Black Excellence in Research Award
The Black award honors tenure-track faculty in the college for exceptional and original agricultural research conducted at Penn State. The award is a tribute to the late Alex Black, who was a professor of animal nutrition and the associate director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at Penn State, and his wife, the late Jessie Clements Black.
Karen Fisher-Vanden, distinguished professor of environmental and resource economics and public policy, received the 2022 Black award for her pioneering environmental economics research. She also is the director of the Institute for Sustainable Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Science, known as SAFES. Fisher-Vanden is internationally recognized as the preeminent U.S. scholar in developing and applying integrated assessment modeling to coupled human and natural systems.
Also recognized was the 2021 Black awardee, Jason Rasgon, professor of entomology and disease epidemiology, whose research focuses on disease-vectoring arthropods. Rasgon has become internationally known as an expert on mosquito genetic manipulation, CRISPR, arthropod symbionts, mosquito densoviruses and viral transduction systems, mosquito population genetics, arbovirology, bedbugs, genetically modified organisms, and vector epidemiology.
Early Achievement in Research Award
Jasna Kovac, the Lester Earl and Veronica Casida Career Development Professor of Food Safety, received the Early Achievement in Research Award. Kovac, assistant professor of food science, came to Penn State in 2017 as one of the first tenure-track hires in the microbiome faculty cluster. Her lab focuses on precision food safety, integrating microbiological, next-generation sequencing and cell-culture methods relevant to microbial food safety.
Research Innovator of the Year
Also acknowledged was Suresh Kuchipudi, who received the 2022 Research Innovator of the Year Award at the Research Innovation Dinner hosted last spring by the college’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation program. Kuchipudi is a clinical professor in veterinary and biomedical sciences and the Huck Chair in Emerging Infectious Diseases. He also serves as the interim director of the Animal Diagnostic Laboratory at Penn State.
Research Professional Staff Awards
Michael Peck, research technologist in the Department of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology, and Tosh Mazzone, research technologist in the Department of Plant Science, received Research Professional Staff Awards, which recognize the outstanding and meritorious contributions of research support personnel.
Peck has provided research leadership for the college’s field and postharvest potato research program for 40 years. He coordinates a network of annual on-farm trials that provide growers and industry stakeholders with the necessary data on potato cultivar performance. He has co-authored 18 peer-reviewed reports.
Mazzone manages field research, including field operations with a diverse set of specialized agronomic equipment, implementation of the experimental design and treatments, and coordination of data collection and reporting. He has been the lead technician on 60 total funded awards valued at $2.3 million.
Integrated Team Award
Melissa Kreye, assistant professor of forest resources management, and Calvin Norman, assistant teaching professor of forestry, accepted the Integrated Team Award. Their integrated team — focused on forest carbon and mitigating climate change — is working to provide landowners with education in climate-smart forestry to help them participate more knowledgeably in payments and technical assistance programs, with an eye toward boosting the development of viable new markets and expanding the forest economy.
The team’s efforts in research and extension are helping private forest owners to become a robust part of climate change adaptation and mitigation solutions.
High-Impact Research Publication Awards
Three research groups received High-Impact Research Publication Awards, recognizing peer-reviewed research that demonstrates significant impact. In the Climate-smart Agriculture and Forestry Impact Area, the award was given to the research team led by Jonathan Lynch, distinguished professor of plant science, for the article “Multiseriate cortical sclerenchyma enhance root penetration in compacted soils,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the Nutritional and Food Security Impact Area, Brian Thiede, associate professor of rural sociology, sociology, and demography, and his group received the award for their paper titled “Climate variability and child nutrition: Findings from sub-Saharan Africa,” which was published in Global Environmental Change.
Receiving the award under the Biodiversity Impact Area was the team that published “Systematic Quantification of Sequence and Structural Determinants Controlling mRNA stability in Bacterial Operons” in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology. Suat Irmak, department head and professor of agricultural and biological engineering, accepted the award for the team led by Howard Salis, associate professor of biological and chemical engineering.
Buck Award
Linlin Fan and Claudia Schmidt received 2021 Roy C. Buck Awards, endowed awards to honor untenured, tenure-track faculty members in the college whose research involves social or human sciences. The award was established by Roy C. Buck, a professor of rural sociology, who retired from Penn State in 1981.
Schmidt, assistant professor of marketing and local/regional food systems, was honored for the publication, “Female farmers in the United States: Research needs and policy questions,” which appeared in Food Policy. In this paper, Schmidt and her colleagues examined the relationship between a county’s share of female-operated farms and the conditions in the county.
Fan, assistant professor of agricultural economics, was recognized for the paper, “Quantifying COVID-19 importation risk in a dynamic network of domestic cities and international countries,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Fan and her colleagues conducted a multiscale geographic analysis of the spread of COVID-19, quantifying the risks of importing the virus based on policy scenarios.
Read more about the awards and past recipients at https://agsci.psu.edu/research/research-awards.