ESA grad student award
Congratulations to Nicole Quinn (former M.S. student) for receiving the Asa Fitch Memorial Graduate Student Award recognizing the research she conducted during her time in the Vegetable Entomology Lab. The Entomological Society of America (ESA) gives this award to an outstanding Masters graduate student each year ($250 and a certificate).
Dr. Wood joins the lab
Dr. Tom Wood joined the lab as a postdoc to work on a new USDA funded project studying the trade-off between pest management and pollinator conservation in cucurbits. This is a collaborative project between Indian, Ohio and Michigan. Welcome to Michigan Tom! Read more about Tom here.
Vegetable Industry Scholarship
Congratulations to Ari Grode (M.S. grad student, on left) who was awarded the MI Vegetable Industry Scholarship ($1,500), which he received at a dinner held at the Great Lakes Expo on December 7, 2016. Ari’s graduate research is on untangling the relationship between onion thrips and bacterial leaf blight.
Lab alumni author pubs
Nicole Quinn and Monica Hufnagel, both former M.S. students in the lab, are lead authors of two new publications from their thesis research. Alex Bryant, also former M.S. student, is co-author on another publication form the research she did while in our lab. Check out the PDFs for all of these manuscripts here.
New USDA Funding
Our grant on organic squash management was funded by USDA-NIFA for 3 years. This project will investigate weed, disease, insect pests as well as pollinators in Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana squash fields. Read more here and here.
New publication
Our new publication by Katie Demeuse, Ari Grode and Zsofia Szendrei has been accepted for publication in Plant Disease. The title of the paper is ‘Comparing qPCR and nested PCR diagnostic methods for aster yellows phytoplasma in aster leafhoppers’.
SARE Grad Student Award
Adam Ingrao received a NCR-SARE graduate student grant for his work on “Luring generalist predators from field borders to control crop pests”. This ~$12,000 award will fund research supplies and an undergraduate assistant to help Adam in his work on biological control in asparagus.
ESA Undergrad Award
Congratulations to Lidia Komondy for winning the Entomology Society of America’s Plant-Insect Ecosystems (PI-E) Section’s Undergraduate Student Achievement Award. This award recognizes undergraduate students who have demonstrated significant achievements through research, teaching and/or outreach in entomology. As many as four awards may be presented annually. Lidia will receive $1,500 and a plaque. The award can be used for travel expenses for participation in the ESA meeting. Lidia has been working as an undergraduate research assistant in our lab for two years and has contributed to multiple ongoing projects.
Awards to lab alumni
Congratulations to two of our lab’s alumni, Nicole Quinn and Katie Demeuse for winning 2016 MSU Entomology Department Awards. Nicole won the Wooley Award for her outstanding achievement in her total Master’s program and Katie won the Entomology Undergraduate Award for her outstanding achievement in the overall undergraduate program.
Winning undergrad poster
Lidia Komondy, MSU entomology undergraduate and URA in the lab, won first prize with her poster at the 2016 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum. Her poster’s title was “The effect of border habitats on predation of a key pest”. It focused on spider abundance and diversity in and around asparagus fields and their interaction with the asparagus miner. She found that quite a few species of spiders consume the miners and are therefore good biological control agents.