The Environment and Natural Resource Institute presents awards to recognize the achievements of faculty, extension educators, staff, and students in environmental and natural resource sciences. Winners will receive a cash prize and a plaque. There are four award categories: Career Award in Environment and Natural Resources, Early Career Award in Environment and Natural Resources, Innovation Award in Environment and Natural Resources, and Outstanding Graduate Student Award.
Nominations are accepted annually in the Spring semester, and evaluated by the ENRI Awards Committee. For nomination details navigate to each award page.
2010 Nominations Due: March 5, 2010
Early Career Award Criteria
Career Award Criteria
Innovation Award Criteria
Outstanding Graduate Student Award Criteria
2009 Award Winners
The ENRI Outstanding Graduate Student Award recognizes the academic achievement, professional potential, and disciplinary contribution of graduate students within the College of Agricultural Sciences whose scholarship focuses on issues in the domain of the environment and natural resources.
Michael J. Castellano
Although he is in the middle of his Ph.D. program, Mr. Castellano is already an accomplished scientist. He has published nine peer reviewed manuscripts (three as first author). In addition, he has engaged a group of Penn State students, postdocs, and faculty, in a reading group that has resulted in a peer reviewed publication that identifies a global pattern in the spatial variability of soil solution nitrogen. His research is forging innovative connections between biogeochemistry and hydrology. He moves fluidly between ideas, the literature, field research, and publications. His co-advisors, Jason Kaye and Henry Lin, have found him to be a catalyst for productivity in their labs. His ability to forge collaborations and bridge disciplines has contributed greatly to the academic environment at Penn State. He is also a highly successful grant writer. He was awarded a prestigious, nationally competitive graduate fellowship from the NOAA, National Estuarine Research Reserve System, and a NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. Mr. Castellano is also actively engaged in outreach programs at the NOAA preserve at Otter Point on the Chesapeake Bay where he is conducting field research.
The ENRI Early Career Award recognizes College of Agricultural Sciences faculty, extension educators, and staff who, early in their careers, show exceptional potential for discovery and leadership at the frontiers of knowledge in the environmental and natural resources sciences.
Jason Philip Kaye
Dr. Kaye, who joined the Crop and Soil Sciences faculty in 2005, has been advancing a new model of the terrestrial nitrogen cycle that accounts for the stability of nitrogen retained in soils. The model is providing a mechanistic basis for understanding forest nitrogen retention by explicitly including both biological and abiotic processes that rapidly stabilize nitrogen in soil organic matter. In contrast to forest ecosystems, agricultural ecosystems are notoriously leaky with respect to the nitrogen cycle. Dr. Kaye’s group is systematically exploring nutrient and tillage management practices that may reduce nitrogen pollution to surface water and the atmosphere. In the long-term, their goal is to identify agroecosystem management practices that minimize nitrogen losses while maintaining yields and profitability. Dr. Kaye’s program is marked by its multidisciplinary nature. Dr. Kaye has been working with economists, demographers, geographers, and many other types of social scientists to understand coupled social-ecological systems. Notably, he co-led a strategic planning initiative, solicited and funded by NSF, to outline an agenda for synthetic research in ecology and social sciences over the next decade. He was one of 25 scientists selected to outline a $30 to 40 million research agenda in this area.
The ENRI Career Award recognizes College of Agricultural Sciences faculty, extension educators, and staff who have had a distinguished career in the environmental and natural resources field for a period of ten or more years.
Douglas B. Beegle
Dr. Beegle began his career at Penn State as an instructor in Agronomy in 1981. Since that time he has earned a national and international reputation as an outstanding extension specialist with programs in soil fertility, and farm nutrient management. He has become a key advisor to government agencies dealing with nutrient management, and played a key role in the development of one of the first comprehensive state Nutrient Management Programs in the country. This program has been held up as a model for science-based nutrient management across the country and internationally. He has also developed and conducted educational programs in nutrient management for farmers, farm advisors, public agencies and non-governmental organizations. In recent years he has been heavily involved in research and extension activities related to develop nutrient management systems that maximize the economic return from nutrients while minimizing the environmental impact.
The ENRI Innovation Award recognizes College of Agricultural Sciences faculty, extension educators, and staff who have made outstanding and innovative contributions in the environmental and natural resources field.
David M. Geiser, Scott A. Isard, Seogchan Kang
Combining their expertise in molecular genetics, informatics, epidemiology, and systematics, Drs. Geiser, Isard, and Kang have presented highly innovative models for integrating human capital, scientific knowledge, and informatics tools to enhance our understanding of the global diversity and dynamics of plant pathogens and to better manage the resulting diseases, and have established a series of novel informatics platforms that support and integrate community research, education and extension on plant pathogens and their diseases. The Phytophthora Database (www.phytophthoradb.org) archives genotypic and phenotypic data from known Phytophthora species and populations for species identification. They also built informatics tools that support data analysis and visualization and characterized the evolutionary relationships within the whole genus to create an evolutionary framework the global Phytophthora community can use as a reference. In collaboration with scientists in many parts of the world, they are now building a global atlas of Phytophthora integrating geographic information system (GIS) tools to the database, that will help monitor pathogen dynamics in environmental, geospatial and temporal contexts. Drs. Geiser and Kang are currently building parallel platforms for monitoring two more major pathogen groups, Fusarium and Pythium, respectively. In the long run, this federation of pathogen databases will support integration and utilization of data from diverse areas of research on plant pathogens, ranging from genomics, phylogenetics and population biology to epidemiology. Dr. Isard and his collaborators led the ipmPIPE project (www.sbrusa.net) to facilitate cooperation among researchers, extension specialists, and regulators in responding to the introduction of soybean rust to North America in 2004. The USDA estimated that the coordinated framework approach, coupled with the ipmPIPE, saved the US soybean growers between $11 and $299 million in 2005 at a low cost of between $2.6 and $5 million. The platforms and approaches Drs. Geiser, Isard and Kang developed have caused major paradigm shifts in research, education and outreach programs in plant pathology and related disciplines. In addition, they have been active in education and service to scientific societies and federal and state governments. They also have collaborated with many pathologists nationally and internationally to advance the basic understanding of major pathogens.
