Student Achievements

Congratulations to Our 2023 Graduates! 

You can tell we are really proud of our students!

Poster Awards at National Meetings

Institute students won several poster awards at various meetings.  Here, we only present the top poster awards at the higher-profile meetings.

Pictured above:

• Qian Feng (Van der Knaap Lab) - 1st place, PhD poster competition, ASHS 2023
• Anne Frances Jarrell (Buell Lab) - 1st place, PhD poster competition, NAPB 2023
• Sydney Webb (Ozias-Akins Lab) - 1st place, MS oral competition, APRES 2023
• Hallie Wright (Devos Lab) - 1st Place, PhD poster competition (C7, Biotechnology), CSSA 2023
• Hallie also took 1st Place in the Society-wide oral poster competition.

IPBGG Scholarship Awards

The IPBGG offers scholarship awards to its top students every year. These are highly competitive and come with a $2500 award.

The 2022 Roger and Cindy Boerma Plant Breeding Excellence Scholarship Award recipient:

• Vinavi Gamage, PhD student in the Mitchum lab working on identifying genes for nematode resistance.  Her dissertation work was just published in Nature Communications. 

The 2022 Glenn and Helen Burton Feeding the Hungry Scholarship Award recipients:

• John Bagwell, PhD student from Georgia, John Bagwell, PhD student from Georgia whose research focuses on finding new Hessian fly, leaf rust, and stripe rust resistance in wheat in Bahri Mergoum and Bahri Mergoum Labs, and who has been active in many national leadership role and outreach activities including one of the 5 graduate students selected nationally to participate in the USDA' s 2024 Future Leaders in Agriculture Program.
• Madav Subedi, a Ph.D. candidate from Nepal, is conducting research to decipher the genetic mechanisms underlying key traits in wheat, including “end-use” quality, yield potential, and agro-morphological characteristics, and who participated in many leadership roles and participated in many national and international meetings.

Learn more about Glenn Burton and his role in the Green Revolution and development of Bermudagrass.

The Peggy Ozias-Akins Leadership in Science Scholarship Award recipient:

• Samuele Lamon, an Italian PhD student, whose research focuses on peanut genetics and genomics in the Bertioli Lab. His research delves into genetic instability in peanuts and its implications for the peanut industry. Furthermore, he engages in various leadership and outreach endeavors throughout his PhD studies.

John Ingle Innovation in Plant Breeding Awards

Dr. John Ingle, during his more than 25 years of leadership at the UGA Research Foundation, was directly responsible for the creation of the Cultivar Development Research Program on campus and its support of cultivar development research projects resulting in the highly successful plant breeding programs at UGA. This Award is sponsored by the UGA Research Foundation to recognize Dr. Ingle’s contribution to planting breeding at UGA and continue to support the improvement of cultivar development at UGA.   

This award provides students with funds for a small research project of their own.  Students compete by preparing a small proposal that gets critically reviewed and thus provides them with an opportunity to hone their grantsmanship skills.  Winning proposals for 2023 were: 

• Stephanie Botton (peanut breeding, Ozias-Akins Lab)
  
  • Development of a high-throughput seed sampler (HTSS) for peanut (Arachis hypogaea) to benefit marker assisted selection breeding
• Nathaniel Burner (soybean breeding and phenomics, Li Lab)
  • Developing and deploying a UAS-based pipeline for determining maturity of soybeans
• Kamalpreet Dhillon (turfgrass breeding, Schwartz lab)
  • Creating pollen or seed sterility in zoysiagrass
• Austin Hart (tomato genetics, Van der Knaap Lab)
  • Establishing a GC-MS protocol at UGA to increase the efficiency of analysis of volatiles emitted by tomato fruits (Solanum lycopersicum)
• Yongjun Yue (ornamental breeding, Zhang Lab)
  • Application of whole genome sequencing on crape myrtle breeding