Previous Seed Grant Winners
Where are they now?
In
1999, Manuel Lerdau
of the Department of Ecology and Evolution was awarded a seed grant
for his proposal,
"Influences of Atmospheric Nitrogen Deposition on Herbivory in Terrestrial
Ecosystems"
This project led to a series of papers by Dr. Lerdau and his student, Heather Throop. Their work integrated modeling and experiments on the impacts of nitrogen deposition on ecosystem function which Heather presented at her dissertation defense, attended by the Provost among others. The relevant papers that emerged appeared in the journals, Ecosystems, Global Change Biology, Atmospheric Environment, and Oikos, with at least one more still to come. Heather is now finishing a NOAA Global Change Post-Doc with Steve Archer at the University of Arizona and will start a faculty position next year at New Mexico. Dr. Lerdau has a proposal pending with the National Science Foundation, Atmospheric Chemistry, to continue work in this area.
In
2003, Manuel Lerdau of the Department of Ecology and
Evolution was awarded a seed grant for his proposal,
"Nitrogen Fixation in Plants: Physiological Studies using Short-lived
Isotopes."
This grant in collaboration with Rich Ferrieri of Chemistry at BNL used the radio facility that Rich manages to explore stress physiology and metabolism in plants. Drs. Lerdau and Ferrieri have two publications out of that work, a paper in Plant, Cell and Environment and one in New Phytologist. This work led to a NSF-FIBR proposal that came close but was not selected, and to the current work that Dr. Ferrieri is leading on sugar metabolism. Dr. Lerdau has low-level EU funding to extend this work to look at oxygenated volatile compounds produced by plants.