Go-Getters
María Fernández-Giménez, MS ’92 Range Manage-ment, PhD ’97 Wildland Resource Science, received the Outstanding Achievement Award for Research at the Society for Range Management’s 67th annual meeting, held in February. Fernández-Giménez is a professor in the Forest and Rangeland Stewardship Department at Colorado State University.
Plant and microbial biology (PMB) graduate student Nicole Abreu has been awarded the American Society for Microbiology’s prestigious Robert D. Watkins Graduate Research Fellowship and will receive up to $21,000 annually over the next three years to continue her work on how bacteria function at a cellular level.
Rebecca Peters, a senior who focuses on water rights, has won a Marshall Scholarship, one of the nation’s top honors for undergraduates. Peters is a double major in society and environment and international development economics. The scholarship funds U.S. students with high leadership potential to pursue graduate studies in the United Kingdom.
CNR graduate students dominated the 2013 Dow Sustainability Innovation Student Challenge Awards, which rewards graduate students working on innovative, interdisciplinary, and sustainable solutions to world challenges in energy and climate change, water, food, housing, and human health. Grand prize winner Michael Gomez, a PhD candidate in PMB, won $10,000 for his efforts to engineer resistance to cassava brown streak disease, a serious threat to a vital food supply in Africa. Gavin McCormick and Dilek Uz, agricultural and resource economics PhD students, along with their biophysics and chemistry teammate Anna Schneider, were named runners-up for WattTime, a method for tuning electricity-consuming equipment to favor power from cleaner sources.