The Ecological Society of America announced fellowship honors for two faculty members in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy:

• Susan Harrison, professor, is among 17 members of the society newly elected as fellows, in recogniting of outstanding contributions to the field. She has been a member of the UC Davis faculty since 1991.

Her fields of interest include plant ecology, diversity and conservation. Her major area of emphasis is spatial ecology, which examines the influence of heterogeneous environments on populations, communities and patterns of diversity.

She is an expert on endemic plants that survive in the harsh soils of serpentine outcroppings.

Her research also examines the effects of natural and human-caused climatic variation on endemic plant communities that are dependent on particular soils.

• Marissa Baskett, assistant professor, also is being recognized for outstanding contributions. Baskett, though, has been named one of six early career fellows, typically having received their doctorates no more than eight years earlier.

Baskett’s lab focuses on theoretical population, community and evolutionary ecology applied to conservation biology, particularly in marine systems. Baskett completed her doctoral studies at Princeton University and was a postdoctoral scholar at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis prior to joining the UC Davis faculty in 2008.

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Two professors are adding president to their titles:

• Sandra Carlson, Department of Geology, has been elected to a two-year term as leader of the Paleontological Society, an international organization devoted to advancing the science of paleontology.

• Robert Bayley, Department of Linguistics, is president-elect of the American Dialect Society. He will advance to the top office in January 2015.

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Louise Berben, assistant professor of chemistry, has been awarded the Chemical Communications Emerging Investigator Lectureship by the journal Chemical Communications, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The lectureship, recognizing scientists in the early stages of their careers, includes three talks over the next year in three different locations.

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The Agriculural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture selected plant sciences professor Paul Gepts to give the B.Y. Morrison Memorial Lecture at the annual meeting of the American Society for Horticultural Science.

Benjamin Y. Morrison (1891-1966) was a scientist, plant breeder, landscape architect, plant explorer, author and lecturer, and the first director of the USDA’s National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. In the process of advancing botany and horticulture in the United States, he developed dozens of new ornamental plants, including the Glenn Dale azaleas.

Gepts’ topic for the July 23 lecture: “Opportunities in Plant Breeding: From the Integration of Genomics to the Participation of Farmers,” about scientific developments “that promise to increase the impact of plant breeding, especially in light of rapidly gathering challenges such as climate instability and population increase.”

His research and teaching program focuses on crop biodiversity and genetic resources. He combines field and laboratory approaches to the evolutionary processes that shape the diversity of crops and their wild progenitors, with a focus on beans and cowpea, as well as Mesoamerican domesticates.

In 2012, he took over UC Davis’ grain legume breeding program, which focuses on the development of new varieties of lima and common bean and garbanzos for the state of California. He also is active in the African Bean Consortium, which seeks to develop a marker-assisted selection capability in East African bean breeding programs.

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Jonna Mazet, a professor of epidemiology and disease ecology in the School of Veterinary Medicine, and director of the school’s Wildlife Health Center, is a newly appointed member of the Morris Animal Foundation’s board of trustees. The Denver-based foundation is a global leader in supporting science to advance veterinary medicine for companion animals and wildlife.

Besides leading the Wildlife Health Center, Mazet is the principal investigator and co-director of the UC Davis-based PREDICT, a global early-warning system for diseases that can be transmitted between animals and people.

In addition, she founded California’s Oiled Wildlife Care Network, which jumps into action to help birds and mammals caught in oil spills. The Wildlife Health Center administers the Oiled Wildlife Care Network, the only such organization of its kind in the world.

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Xiaomei Chen, professor and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, says she will work on a project titled “Staging Chinese Revolutions,” during her 2013-14 fellowship with the International Research Center, connected to Freie Universität Berlin.

Founded in August 2008, the International Research Center investigates the interweaving of cultures in performance. “The topic refers to the whole range of processes and phenomena in which different cultures meet through performance, continuously producing various and specific differences, thus profundly questioning fixed concepts of cultural identity,” according to the center’s website.

“Through performative practices and modes of presentation, political and social dimensions become apparent: Processes of interweaving are inextricably linked to questions of economic power, migration, corpo-realities and identity politics, as well as to strategies of appropriation and translation.”

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Dateline UC Davis welcomes news of faculty and staff awards, for publication in Laurels. Send information to dateline@ucdavis.edu.

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