SDC team competing for $2 million in Solar Decathlon
Students in the School of Design and Construction will plan and build a solar home over the next two years in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon, competing for $2 million in prize money.
WSU is one of 16 college teams picked to design a 600- to 1,000-square-foot home that receives all its energy from the sun. Read more here.
Doctoral student Ali Abghari leads a team developing a prototype method to use yeast to create monomers.
BSE teams win prototype funding in Environmental Innovation Challenge
Two teams of graduate students in the Biological Systems Engineering department won prototype funding in the Alaska Airlines Environmental Innovation Challenge.
Rishikesh Ghogare and Yaojing Qiu won $2,500 to develop ways to turn waste into biofuels and valuable chemicals. Ali Abghari, Iva Jovanovic Tews, Abid Hossain Tanzil, Anthony Edward Robbins, Amelia Hodges and Yuxiao Xie won $1,500 to engineer a safe way to use yeast to create monomers—building blocks for food, drugs and bio-plastics—from feedstock waste and byproducts. Professor Shulin Chen and research associate Xiaochao Xiong advise both teams.
Abghari, Ghogare and Xiong also received a travel award, enabling them to give presentations on biofuels and bioproducts at professional conferences.
The Environmental Innovation Challenge happens March 31.
Recovery Team helps Arlington, Darrington compete in America’s Best Communities
The cities of Arlington and Darrington, which were devastated by the deadly Oso mudslide in 2014, have been selected as semifinalists in a three-year, $10 million competition that helps communities boost their economies.
WSU’s SR 530 Recovery Team was instrumental in helping the cities create economic development plans for the America’s Best Communities competition. Learn more in this Everett Herald article.
Oilseed workshop attendees view an exhibit in Colfax.
Oilseed workshops were a hit with attendees
Growers, agriculture industry and local and state agency representatives were among 265 attendees at recent oilseed workshops in Colfax, Odessa and Dayton. Crop consultants and producers gave their perspectives about the value of oilseeds on their farms and in the Pacific Northwest, and WSU, OSU and UI faculty and students shared recent research findings. Powerpoint presentations from the workshops will be available soon at www.css.wsu.edu/biofuels.
Awards and Grants
Robert Zinna
Entomology’s Zinna wins top award for exploring genetics of beetle horns
Entomology graduate student Robert Zinna won the prestigious Aubrey Gorbman Award for best student presentation at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology‘s 2016 annual meeting in Portland, Ore.
Zinna’s research looks at how the growth of beetle horns is influenced by nutrition. For his presentation in the Division of Comparative Endocrinology, he explored how endocrine genes respond to different levels of nutrition, contributing to horn growth.
Zhihua Jiang
With $475K grant, Animal Sciences team look to genes for healthier, tastier beef
Zhihua Jiang, Larry Fox, Min Du and Martin Maquivar, professors in the Department of Animal Sciences, recently received a nearly half-million-dollar grant to identify key genes that influence meat quality and healthfulness in beef, and mastitis and metritis—udder and uterus inflammation—in dairy cattle.
The USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture Foundational Grant for $475,000 is titled “Genome-wide mapping of alternative polyadenylation sites in cattle.” Besides helping build consumer confidence in beef, the WSU researchers are developing new non-antibiotic treatments, addressing concerns over the rise of drug-resistant bacteria.
Awards help entomologists study insect controls, relationships
Five members of the Department of Entomology recently picked up nearly $90,000 in awards and grants.
Professor and entomologist Elizabeth Beers received a $10,000 award from Nichino AM and $4,000 from Syngenta for tree-fruit insect controls.
Entomologists David Crowder and Paul Chisholm received a $65,509 USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture/Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Fellowship to look at relationships between bugs, plant pathogens and nitrogen fixation in legume crops.
Professor John Stark and research associate Tanyalee Erwin received $6,500 from HERRERA for a low-impact development code update. Stark, who is director of the Washington Stormwater Center, also received a $2,000 grant from the Washington Department of Ecology to study toxicity of alternative bumper materials.
Clark County Extension helps families get better nutrition
Sandra G. Brown, a food safety and nutrition professor with WSU Extension’s Youth and Families Program, and Douglas Stienbarger, Clark County Director of the Extension Community and Economic Development program, this winter received $52,600 from the Washington Department of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the Clark County Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentives project, or FINI.
The two-year program helps improve nutrition for low-income households by increasing their purchases of fruits and vegetables. The researchers thank the Camas, Vancouver and Salmon Creek farmer’s markets for their participation.
Learn more about Clark County Extension programs here.
