Ten graduate students conducting research at Cornell's New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y., collected awards totaling over $18,000 by the close of the 1999-2000 academic year.
Amy Roda, Fred Musser, Frank Wong, Andrea Ficke, Cruz Avila-Adame, Yanxin Gao, Jirarat Tattiyakul, Jane Friedrich, Kathryn Deibler and Jill Richardson all received either an award, scholarship, endowment or travel grant.
In the Department of Entomology, Fred Musser was awarded the Chapman Fellowship, which includes tuition and a stipend for the 2000-2001 school year. Musser researches the effectiveness of natural biological controls as a method of pest control.
Amy Roda, also in entomology, works on the effects of leaf morphology on mites. Roda was this past year's Chapman Fellowship winner. She received the Griswold Endowment Grant and the W. Arthur and Alma D. Rawlins Graduate Student Endowment Award, both from Cornell's Department of Entomology. At the Entomological Society of America's (ESA) national meeting in Atlanta, Ga., she took second place and the president's prize for her biological control entry in the ESA Student Competition.
The $1000 Daisy Ren Wu and Liu Memorial Award went to Yanxin Gao in horticultural sciences. Yanxin also won a $600 travel grant to attend the fifth International Solanaceae Conference in Nijmegen, Holland, July 24-29, to present a paper on verticillium wilt in eggplants.
Plant pathologists Frank Wong and Cruz Avila-Adame went to New Orleans on $400 travel grants from the American Phytopathological Society (APS) to attend the APS meeting, Aug. 12-17. "It's always good to get an award like this, because then you know you're doing something relevant," said Avila-Adame.
Andrea Ficke, also in plant pathology, won a travel fellowship from Cornell's Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies for the second year in a row. The award will help finance a trip to Australia for Ficke to continue collaborative studies with Ian Dry at the University of Adelaide. Ficke studies grape berry resistance to the powdery mildew fungus as it relates to fruit age.
Two graduate students in food science, Jane Friedrich and Kathryn Deibler, won awards this year. Friedrich won the $250 Downing Graduate Student Excellence Award and the $750 Kosi Award in Food Science. The American Chemical Society's George Charalambous Graduate Fellowship in food chemistry, worth $3,000, went to Deibler, as did the $1,000 Herzog Graduate Research Award in food science, the $5,000 IFT National Fellowship for 1999-2000, and a $500 grant from the Mario Einaudi Center.
"She managed to win a number of awards, but the greatest prize Kathryn brought the department is a $144,000 research grant from the National Research Initiative," said her research adviser, Terry Acree, professor of food science and technology. The grant will be used for continuing research on flavor.
Three other food scientists won awards. The American Wine Society Educational Foundation awarded Jill Richardson a $2,500 scholarship. Han-Bin Chen won $200 in the Institute of Food Technologists' graduate student paper competition. And the $250 Goya Food Prize was awarded to Jirarat Tattiyakul, who is working toward a degree in food engineering. The Society of Chemical Industry in the United Kingdom also awarded Tattiyakul 2,000 pounds ($3,000) for the Seligman Fellowship.
Tattiyakul has had an outstanding record of accomplishments at Cornell. Last year, she won the John Kinsella Award ($200) for service to international students and the Ruth Herzog Award ($1,000) for excellence in food science.
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