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RESEARCH
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ANNOUNCEMENTS
Somayanda Impa Muthappa, an expert in crop physiology, has been named a Research Assistant Professor within the Department of Plant & Soil Science. She officially stepped into her new research post on April 15. Muthappa's research program broadly focuses on enhancing yield potential and abiotic stress resilience in grain and forage sorghum, and one of her primary goals at Texas Tech is to help develop novel physiological and biochemical tools and methods to enhance quality and productivity of grain sorghum.
The 2022 Plant & Soil Science Student Research Symposium was held on April 18, providing an opportunity for students at all stages of their programs to present their research and receive feedback from peers, faculty, staff, and external experts. This year's event consisted of a pre-symposium seminar by Dr. Daniel Hirmas, graduate student oral presentations, and poster presentations by undergraduate, master's, and doctoral students. The award winners for the 2022 Symposium were:
Oral Session | Graduate Students
1st place – Maxwell Smith
2nd place – Leo D'Agostino
3rd place – Raavi Arora
Poster Session | Graduate Students
1st place – Chidinma Lois Nwoko
2nd place – Avinash Shrestha
3rd place – Manpreet Singh
Poster Session | Undergraduate Students
1st place – Danira Garcia Gutierrez
2nd place – Lee Fischel
The Texas Tech Accelerator is designed to help faculty, students and other entrepreneurs in the region launch startup companies or discover licensing opportunities based on inventions of university technology to make an impact to benefit the people in this community and around the world. Gabriella Hale, a PSS doctoral candidate, was selected as one of 16 startups tapped to participate in the program's sixth cohort competition. Hale and her husband, Gary, lead operations for G&G Ranch, a developer of pre-fabricated crop-canopy netting kits that enable West Texas farmers to grow specialty crops with less time and resources.
PSS's Lindsey Slaughter was one of the three Davis College faculty members recognized during a special 'Celebrate Women Faculty Success' ceremony at the university's main library. The President's Gender Equity Council, Rawls College of Business, and TTU ADVANCE hosted the event, which was part of the university's commemoration of Women's History Month.
Young recently received a $425,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA) to conduct professional development for agriculture and science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) educators centered around turfgrass science. "Our goal is to work with educators to provide professional development on how turfgrass science could be implemented as STEM," Young said. "One of the benefits we pointed out in the proposal is the vast openness there is to turfgrass. Almost every student in any place could have some kind of interaction with turfgrass."
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