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Category: News

Listing of news from the Institute of Bioinformatics at University of Georgia

Professor of crop, soil sciences, plant biology named AAAS Fellow | Columns | UGA

Katrien M. Devos, a professor of crop and soil sciences and plant biology at UGA, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers.

In 2016, 391 members were awarded this honor by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. New Fellows will be presented with an official certificate and gold and blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pin in February at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2017 AAAS annual meeting in Boston.

Devos, who holds a joint appointment in UGA’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, was elected as an AAAS Fellow for her important contributions to the field of comparative genomics of the grasses, particularly cereal grains, that are commonly grown in less developed countries.

“Selection as an AAAS Fellow is a major milestone in a scientist’s career, and thus the University of Georgia is enormously pleased Dr. Devos has been selected for this honor,” said David Lee, vice president for research. “This peer recognition is important to our faculty and it also brings added distinction to the university.”

Devos earned her doctorate from the University of Ghent, Belgium. She conducted pioneering research on the comparative genetics of cereals at the John Innes Center in Norwich, U.K., before joining UGA in 2003.

Her current research focuses on the structure, function and evolution of grass genomes, particularly switchgrass, wheat, millets and the turfgrass seashore Paspalum.

Devos recently received a $1.8 million collaborative grant from the National Science Foundation to study the genetics of finger millet, an important food security crop for many farmers in Eastern Africa, and of the fungal pathogen Magnaporthe oryzae, which causes blast disease in finger millet.

The resources developed will help breeders create more efficient, sustainable varieties of finger millet that are also resistant to blast disease.

Source: Professor of crop, soil sciences, plant biology named AAAS Fellow | Columns | UGA

IOB Graduate Student Awarded Fellowship

PhD student Rahil Taujale has been named a Training Fellow in the Glycoscience Training Program at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center at UGA.

Congratulations Rahil!

More information on the GTP can be found here.

IOB Member Awarded “Doctor Honoris Causa”

Dr. David P. Landau, Distinguished Research Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and the Member of the Institute of Bioinformatics, has been awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa by the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG).

Federal University of Minas Gerais is a federal university located in Belo Horizonte, state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. UFMG is one of Brazil’s five largest universities, being the largest federal university.

Dr. Alexander Bucksch attending AGU Fall Meeting

Dr. Bucksch is the session organizer at the AGU Fall meeting being held in San Fransisco, California, December 12-16, 2016. Dr. Bucksch’s session is titled “Revealing the hidden half: Advances in imaging and quantification of plant roots and root-soil interactions.”

New Course Offered: BINF 8950

BINF 8950 – SYSTEMS BIOLOGY


Systems Biology is about explaining complex traits, such as the clock, development, carbon cycling, and malaria in terms of underlying pathways.  We will introduce omics approaches to identifying  the underlying pathways for such traits.

We are taking a novel educational approach to systems biology using the framework of a collaboratorium, in which students work in collaborative teams on an interdisciplinary project providing the capstone experience for the course.  Each student will develop their own personalized syllabus using a tool call ALICE for Adaptive Learning in an Interdisciplinary Collaborative Environment to solve a systems biology research problem of their team’s choosing.

Time and Place: 4:00 to 5:30 pm Tuesday & Thursday, C128 Life Sciences

The syllabus for the course is available:

http://euler.math.uga.edu/alice/src/initium.aspx