Plant Molecular Biology Reporter 19: 103-107, 2001 �9 2001 International Society for Plant Molecular Biology. Printed in Canada.

Appointments and Awards

Kumho Science International Award in Plant Molecular Biology and Biotechnology

The Kumho Cultural Foundation of Korea (beginning in 2000) annually presents the Kumho Award, a prize of US $30,000, for meritorious research in plant mo- lecular biology and biotechnology. The prize is for the recipient's personal use. The recipient(s) is flown to Korea, at Kumho expense, to attend the award cere- mony and to deliver an award lecture at the Kumho Life and Environmental Engi- neering Laboratory (KLESL) in Kwagju, Korea. The ISPMB, by means of a specially appointed committee, chooses the award recipients.

2001 Awardees

The Kumho Foundation wishes to recognize the contributions of the entire Arabidopsis Genome Initiative for successfully completing the sequencing of the Arabidopsis genome. Towards this end, several scientists have been designated by the foundation to share the Kumho Award on behalf of the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative.

Because the number of award recipients who were chosen by an ISPMB Committee is unusually large, the Kumho Foundation increased the monetary value of its award to a total of US $36,000. This sum is to be equally divided among the award recipients.

Professor Michael Bevan is the head of the Cell and De- velopmental Biology Department at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK, and a professor at the University of East Anglia since 1998. He received his BSc, MSc (Hons) from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and his PhD Cantab. in 1979. He did his postdoctoral research at Wash- ington University in St. Louis, Missouri, from 1980-1982. Dr. Bevan was a staff scientist at the Plant Breeding Insti- tute in Cambridge, UK, from 1983-1988 and head of the Molecular Genetics Department at the Plant Breeding Insti- tute/John Innes Centre from 1988-2001.

Joseph R. Ecker is a professor at the Salk Institute for Bi- ological Studies in La Jolla, California. He received his bachelor's degree in 1978 from the College of New Jersey, his PhD in microbiology from Pennsylvania State Univer- sity College of Medicine in 1982. He did postdoctoral stud- ies at Stanford University School of Medicine under Ronald W. Davis. In 1987, Dr. Ecker joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and the Plant Science

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Institute. He became a Salk faculty member in 2000 where he is a member of the Laboratory of Plant Biology and the Director of the Salk Institute Genomic Analysis Laboratory.

Rob Martienssen is a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Lab- oratory in New York. He received a bachelor of arts in Natu- ral Sciences (1982) and a PhD in Plant Genetics (1986) from Cambridge University, UK. He did his graduate work with David Baulcombe at the Plant Breeding Institute in Cam- bridge and postdoctoral studies in maize genetics with Bill Taylor and Mike Freeling at the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a faculty member in the plant group at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since 1989.

Francis Quetier is a professor at Evry University and the deputy director of Genoscope. He did his background stud- ies at Paris-XI Orsay University in France and was re- cruited as an assistant lecturer (1964) and then as a professor at Orsay University (1978-2000). Dr. Quetier worked in the plant molecular biology department from 1964-1994 in Orsay. His research career began in 1964 with the study of plant DNA at Orsay and became focused on chloroplast and mitochondrial genome organization in 1970. He joined Jean Weissenbach's team at Genethon in 1995 (human genome). Since 1996, he has been involved in the sequencing of the various eukaryotic genomes car- ried out by Genoscope.

Chris Somerville is the director of the Carnegie Institution Department of Plant Biology and a professor in the Depart- ment of Biological Sciences at Stanford University. He re- ceived a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1973 and a PhD in genetics in 1978, both from the University of Al- berta. He did postdoctoral studies at the University of Illi- nois with Bill Ogren. Before moving to Carnegie/Stanford, he was a faculty member at the University of Alberta (1980-1982) and the DOE Plant Research Laboratory at Michigan State University (1982-1993).

Satoshi Tabata is project leader at Kazusa DNA Research Institute. He received his undergraduate education in the Department of Biology, School of Science at Kobe Univer- sity (1973-1977) and his graduate education at the Institute for Chemical Research at Kyoto University, receiving his PhD in 1983. He was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of California in San Diego. He was a techni- cal official and then an assistant professor at Kyoto Univer- sity, an assistant professor and then associate professor at

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Nagoya University, and then a senior researcher at the Kazusa DNA Research Institute.

Athanasios Theologis is a senior scientist at the Plant Gene Expression Center/USDA and adjunct professor at the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berke- ley. He received his bachelor of arts degree in 1967 from the Agricultural College of Athens in Greece and his PhD in 1979 from the Department of Biology at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. Dr. Theologis received postdoctoral training at Stanford University in California in the Depart- ment of Biological Sciences (1979-1982) and in the De- partment of Biochemistry at the Stanford School of Medicine (1982-1984). From 1984-1987, Dr. Theologis was an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Chemistry at the Washington University School of Medi- cine in St. Louis, Missouri.

Owen White is Director of Bioinformatics at the Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR). He has been responsible for development of TIGR's annotation methodology. He leads the Comprehensive Microbial Resource Project sponsored by the Department of Energy. Dr. White has managed much of the annotation and analysis of the Arabidopsis ge- nome sequence. His team will be responsible for the con- tinued international effort to maintain and improve the Arabidopsis database. Dr. White received a bachelor of sci- ence in Biotechnology in 1985 at the University of Massa- chusetts in Amherst. He received his PhD in Molecular Biology from New Mexico State University in 1992. After two years postdoctoral work, he continued at TIGR as a collaborative investigator (1994-1997) and as assistant in- vestigator (1997-1998). Dr. White was appointed deputy di- rector of bioinformatics and associate investigator in 1998. In 2000, he was named director of bioinformatics and in- vestigator at TIGR.

Call for Nominations for 2002 Kumho Award

Any ISPMB member can nominate candidates for the award by contacting society headquarters at ldure@arches.uga.edu. No nomination form is needed. Nomina- tions for the 2002 award should be mailed to the society by November 1, 2001.