Image: Mariel Pfeifer, a graduate student in the lab of Chang Hyun Khang, won the 2021 Wilbur Duncan Award. This award is the highest recognition awarded to students in Plant Biology and it recognizes a PBIO graduate student's excellence in two of three areas: research, teaching and service to the department. Mariel has nine peer-reviewed publications, which includes five fungal biology articles, and four education research/materials. She is first author for six of them. She is also committed to teaching: Mariel received Graduate Teaching Transcript in 2021 and was recognized by CTL for ongoing and in-depth professional teaching development. Mariel has contributed in service to the department and UGA through her leading roles in multiple student bodies including SEER center, PBGSA Teaching and Outreach, and Mycology Graduate Student Organization. Wilbur H. Duncan (1910-2005) was a faculty member and Curator of the UGA Herbarium in what was then the Botany Department for 40 years (1938-1978). He increased the herbarium collection from 16,000 to 135,000 specimens, described 3 new plant species and published five books, three of them with Marion, his botanist wife of 64 years and after he had officially retired. He is remembered by colleagues as a skilled field botanist, gifted teacher, field guide, author, plant photographer and friend. Trevor Tuma, a graduate student in the lab of C.J. Tsai, won the 2021 PBIO Grad Student Paper of the Year Award for his published work on the detrimental effects of problematic mentoring in journal CBE – Life Sciences Education. Trevor’s article presents results of an interview study which characterizes negative mentoring experiences of a group of life science doctoral students, with an aim to help mentors, mentees, as well as institutions in preventing impacts of negative mentoring. Congratulations also to Ankita Roy, a graduate student in the lab of Alex Bucksch, who received an honorable mention for the Paper of the Year Award for her publication on root hair morphological variation in the journal Current Opinion in Plant Biology! Papers: Tuma, T. T., Adams, J. D., Hultquist, B. C., & Dolan, E. L. (2021). The dark side of development: a systems characterization of the negative mentoring experiences of doctoral students. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 20(2), ar16. Roy, A., & Bucksch, A. (2021). Root hairs vs. trichomes: Not everyone is straight!. Current opinion in plant biology, 64, 102151.
