Campuses:
Regents Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair Ron Phillips will retire at the end of May after 42 years on the faculty of the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics. His career will be celebrated on May 24 with an all-day symposium and gala dinner. The symposium will feature several of Phillips’ 55 graduate students and some of his 20 postdoctoral scientists talking about their recent research. Phillips also recently was named 2010 Medal for Science winner by the University of Bologna.
A tireless promoter of soybeans, the leader of one of Minnesota’s best-known food companies and a world-renowned scientist and teacher at the University of Minnesota are this year’s recipients of the prestigious Siehl Prize For Excellence in Agriculture.
The annual prize recipients are chosen in three categories: knowledge (teaching, research and outreach) production agriculture and agribusiness. This year’s winners are:
Sander “Sandy” Ludeman (’69–B.S., agricultural economics), production agriculture, a farmer from Tracy, Minn., who led the drive to create a National Soybean Checkoff, the commodity self-funding program that has dramatically increased awareness and production of soybeans around the globe over the past two decades.
Donald Helgeson (’55–B.S., animal science), agribusiness, of St. Cloud, who along with his brother Jerry bought the family’s small hatchery in the 1950s and grew it into what’s today known as Gold’n Plump Poultry. The largest fully integrated chicken producer in the Upper Midwest, Gold’n Plump breeds and hatches its own chickens, mills its own feed, and processes its products in company-owned plants.
Ronald Phillips, knowledge, one of the University of Minnesota’s most distinguished faculty who is known for his groundbreaking discoveries in plant genetics and genomics. His was the first laboratory to regenerate corn plants from cells in tissue culture, a contribution that allowed for development of genetic engineering in cereal crops.
The recipients were announced in March as part of the celebration of National Ag Week and will be honored at a ceremony on campus in May. The Siehl Prize was created in the early 1990s by a generous gift from New Ulm-area livestock breeder and businessman Eldon Siehl, a dedicated philanthropist who had a lifelong interest in agricultural systems. Recipients receive a $50,000 award as well as a sculpture and lapel pin designed by Minnesota artist Thomas Rose especially for the Siehl Prize.
Carol Windels (’72–M.S.; ’80–Ph.D., plant pathology), professor in the Department of Plant Pathology who works at the Northwest Research and Outreach Center, has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of three new Fellows from the University of Minnesota. They were recognized for their contributions to science and technology at the AAAS annual meeting in February. The new Fellows received a certificate and a blue and gold rosette as a symbol of their accomplishments.
Assistant professors Ken Kozak and Dylan Millet have been named University of Minnesota McKnight Land-Grant professors for 2010-12. The program aims to advance the careers of promising junior faculty. The winners were chosen for their potential for important contribution to their field; the degree to which their achievements and ideas demonstrate originality, imagination and innovation; the significance of their research; and the potential for attracting outstanding students. Kozak is in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology and on the staff at the Bell Museum; Millet is in the Department of Soil, Water and Climate.
Department of Forest Resources professor Peter Reich has been named this year’s winner of the prestigious BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge award in ecology and conservation biology. Reich was honored for his work in global metabolic plant ecology, most notably his discovery of universal rules of leaf design and related scaling of plant physiology from seedling to tree, from cell to ecosystem, and from the stand to the globe.
Reich is a Regents professor and participates in many interdisciplinary research and teaching efforts. Along with a cash prize, the award includes a diploma and a commemorative artwork. All of this year’s awards will be formally presented at a ceremony in Madrid this summer.
The awards, endowed by an Italian finance firm, honor world-class research and artistic creation in eight categories closely aligned with 21st-century scientific, technical, economic and social challenges.
A team at the Water Resources Center has been tapped by the state to develop a 25-year framework for the sustainable management of Minnesota’s water resources. The year-long process will result in a roadmap that includes time lines and benchmarks for the investment of an estimated $86 million a year earmarked for the protection of water as a result of Minnesota’s Clean Water Legacy Act.
Through an advisory committee and citizen listening sessions, the framework is intended to identify investments that will protect Minnesota’s lakes, rivers and ground waters without compromising people’s current needs or natural ecosystems. The overall plan will address a range of water issues, from boating to agricultural practices.
Historical materials from and about Norman Borlaug will be digitized at the University of Minnesota’s libraries and archives, thanks to a grant from Minnesota’s new Clean Water Legacy Act funds.
Borlaug—who received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in CFANS—was a world-renowned plant pathologist and humanitarian who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his development of the high-yield, disease resistant wheat that is credited with saving billions of people from starvation. He died in 2009 at age 95.
Fifty-eight boxes of archival material will be digitized, including five decades of field notebooks, the pocket-sized books in which Borlaug documented his travel and work in Mexico, South America, Africa, the Middle East, South and South East Asia and Eastern Europe.
Papers from some of Borlaug’s contemporaries will also be included in the digital collection, including correspondence and photographs from E. C. Stakman, Borlaug’s mentor and longtime head of the plant pathology department. The project will be completed by May 2011.
Erma Vizenor, chairwoman of the White Earth Tribal Council, will be the keynote speaker at this year’s CFANS commencement. The ceremony will be at 7 p.m. May 14 at Northrop Auditorium on the U of M’s East Bank campus. Vizenor became the tribal chair of the 22,000-member White Earth Band of Chippewa in Minnesota in 2004 and was the first woman to hold the position.
Department of Applied Economics professor Stephen Polasky has been elected a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. He is one of 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 14 countries who were elected April 28 in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. He’s just the 32nd University of Minnesota faculty member to earn the honor.
Each fall, almost 300 new freshmen enroll in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences. How are they chosen? What did they do to increase their chances of admission? We asked Jay Bell, the CFANS associate dean for academic programs and faculty affairs and Wayne Sigler, director of admissions, University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, to explain the freshman admissions process and how it applies to future CFANS students.
For the complete interview, go to the Admissions FAQ.
What does it take to get accepted into the University of Minnesota today?
“Admission to the University of Minnesota is competitive, much more so than it was 20 or 30 years ago,” Sigler says. “For example, 34,000 applications were received to fill the 5,400 freshman openings at the University of Minnesota for fall semester 2009. Colleges set their enrollment targets so that they put students in position for success, through course availability, access to advisors and housing, as well as other factors that will add up to a positive experience for them.”
At CFANS, applications for admission in the fall of 2010 are up as of early December, Bell says, as are the number of admission offers being extended to incoming freshmen.
“Over the past three years CFANS applications have grown from 1,415 to 1,642 so far this year. We manage this applicant pool to give us a freshman class. The academic profile of the freshman class has increased steadily the past several years, making CFANS quite competitive from an admissions perspective,” Bell says.
Jonathan Schilling, assistant professor in the Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering, is one of 69 scientists from across the nation who will receive five-year research grants as part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program.
Schilling’s project will involve characterizing the enzymatic mechanisms used by brown rot fungi to degrade woody biomass and looking at how the process might be duplicated in preparing woody biomass for use as biofuels. The research was featured in the Winter 2009 issue of Solutions.
The Minnesota Landscape Arboretum will welcome a new director this summer; he is Edward L. Schneider, currently president and CEO of the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden in California. He will be the Arboretum’s fourth director since it was founded nearly 52 years ago.
Before joining the Santa Barbara garden in 1992, Schneider was a member of the Texas State University faculty, most recently as dean of the College of Science for more than eight years.
For more than 30 years, the University of Minnesota led an international initiative to train professors at the Institute of Agronomy and Veterinary Medicine, Hassan II and the National Schools of Agriculture and Forestry in Morocco. The partnership consisted of the Kingdom of Morocco building the campuses along with the collaboration of more than 25 land-grant universities in the United States training a generation of professors. Now, thanks to a new agreement, CFANS and the College of Veterinary Medicine at the university have a new partnership with four Moroccan institutions of higher learning. The agreement was signed in December after several visits to the West African country by University of Minnesota leaders.
Different people collect different things. Some like baseball cards, some like shoes, and some like coins. I like books about insects. No, really, I do. Just glancing up from my desk I can count something like 5 field guides, 10 general entomology texts, and a slew of others that fit into other categories like insect control, insect taxonomy and insect physiology. (I have a lot more at home.) If you were to spend some time with these books you would discover rather quickly that, all in all, entomologists are boring writers. No zip, little spark. And that, in a nutshell, is why I like Jeff Hahn’s new book, Insects of the North Woods, so much.
Just looking at the cover of Insects of the North Woods, you might be convinced that this is just a typical insect field guide. It’s got some pretty pictures and, on the back, the obligatory author photo. But when you open the pages of this book you quickly discover that it is not only as informative as you would expect from a University of Minnesota entomologist, it’s also entertaining. This book literally drips with Hahn’s personality and sense of humor. Between talking about receiving a gift of a dead insect being every woman’s dream when referring to scorpion fly mating rituals, and the mini scuba tanks that predaceous diving beetles use, you get the feel that this isn’t just an entomologist reciting dry facts. Instead, this is an author who loves his subjects and who wants the reader to love them too. Like most people, I don’t read field guides cover to cover, but with this book I have often found myself reading page by page because I don’t want to miss one of Hahn’s insightful comments (or one of his amusing analogies).
Besides the writing, this field guide has everything else that you’d expect a field guide to have including great pictures (mostly by the author), a nicely indexed system for finding the insect you’re looking for, and a nice, but not overly done introduction. Though this guide concentrates on insects of the north woods and so is, at least in theory, intended for use in northern Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota, it is also the best book available for identifying insects in forests around the Twin Cities area and is a great first field guide for any amateur entomologist. If you enjoy insects, or if you’re just interested in knowing what some of the insects that flit about your trees are then you shouldn’t miss this book. – Jeff Gillman
