AUBURN, Ala.— Twenty College of Agriculture/Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station scientists who landed a combined $11.4 million-plus in grants and contracts over the course of a year were honored as 2012 Grantsmanship Award winners and 21 other faculty and staff received top awards during the college/AAES’ annual awards program Dec. 6 at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art.
Recipients of the Grantsmanship Award, which is presented to researchers who secure at least $250,000 in extramural grants and contracts during a fiscal year, included Conner Bailey and Sam Fowler from the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology; Eve Brantley, agronomy and soils; Ed Sikora, Henry Fadamiro, Joseph Kloepper and Kathy Lawrence, entomology and plant pathology; Sushil Adhikari, Oladiran Fasina, Puneet Srivastava and Steve Taylor, biosystems engineering; Jesse Chappell, Allen Davis, Terry Hanson, Carol Johnston, John Liu, Jim Stoeckel, Steve Szedlmayer and Bill Walton, fisheries and allied aquacultures; and Patricia Curtis, poultry science. Individual totals ranged from $250,000 to almost $2.6 million.
Top college/AAES research honors for the year went to entomology professor Nannan Liu and fisheries and allied aquacultures assistant professor Ash Bullard, who received the Director’s Senior Research Award and the Director’s Junior Research Award, respectively. On the academic front, agronomy and soils professor Beth Guertal won the 2012 Dean’s Award for Advising Excellence, while horticulture assistant professor Carolyn Robinson and poultry science associate professor Shelly McKee each received the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Agronomy and soils’ Brantley took home the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Extension and Outreach.
Bill Daniels, associate professor in the Department of Fisheries and Allied Aquacultures, was presented the 2012 Richard L. Guthrie Award for Achievement in International Agriculture, while a newly established honor, the High-Impact Paper of the Year Award, went to agricultural economics associate professor Valentina Hartarska.
The College of Agriculture’s 2012 Project Team Award was presented to nine faculty and staff involved in “Pond to Plate,” an initiative the Department of Fisheries and Allied Aquacultures launched in 2009 to improve the profitability of Alabama’s catfish industry by reducing waste at every level of the value stream. Team members include, from fisheries, John Jensen, Jesse Chappell, Terry Hanson, Jeffery Terhune, David Cline and Luke Roy; from biosystems engineering, Yifen Wang and Shaoyang Liu; and, from the College of Business, Terri Lawrence.
Also at the awards program, five College of Ag/AAES staff members received Employee of the Year honors. Winning in the teaching/research/outreach professional category were research associate Brenda Wood and natural resource program adviser John Owen, both in the Department of Agronomy and Soils. In the professional/managerial category, winners were Kelley Terry, contracts and grants specialist in biosystems engineering and the AAES, and, from the E.V. Smith Research Center in Shorter, director Greg Pate and associate director Shawn Scott. The 2012 Diversity Award, meanwhile, was presented to Cynthia Channell-Butcher, academic program administrator in horticulture.
For more information about each award, go to http://www.ag.auburn.edu/dean/awards/.
