As the first-ever recipient, Simona Radutoiu received “The Adam Kondorosi Academia Europaea Award for Early Career Investigators” during a conference in Budapest, Hungary, for her outstanding scientific contributions to research in plant-microbe interactions. Presented at the biannual European Nitrogen Fixation Conference, the award “goes to a young researcher who has worked less than 10 years as a principal investigator, and who has made a special contribution in the study of plant-microbe symbiosis, nitrogen fixation or other related fields,” according to AARHUS University. View the full story here.
Adam Bogdanove was awarded the Noel T. Keen Award for Research Excellence in Molecular Plant Pathology by the American Phytopathological Society. This award recognizes those who have made outstanding contributions and demonstrated sustained excellence and leadership in research that advances the understanding of molecular aspects of host-pathogen interactions, plant pathogens, or plant-associated microbes, or molecular biology of disease development or defense mechanisms.
Adam J. Bogdanove, a professor of plant pathology and plant-microbe biology at Cornell University, is an internationally recognized expert on the molecular basis of bacterial pathogenesis of plants and a leader in the use of novel technologies, derived from molecular plant pathology, for genome engineering. Bogdanove’s pioneering research on two pathogens of rice has elucidated the mechanism by which pathogen-encoded TAL effectors manipulate host gene expression to induce disease susceptibility. His work represents elegant, cutting-edge molecular plant pathology and lays the foundation for the development of novel forms of control of two important diseases of rice. Of equal significance, Bogdanove’s research is leading the way in the use of TAL effectors to make highly precise modifications to genes in plants and animals, a technology that allows investigation of the biological function of genes and has great promise as a powerful method of genome editing.
