Undergraduate ethnobotany major Mitch Hall of McHenry won the Li-COR Prize from the Botanical Society of America, given each year by the Physiological Section to acknowledge the best presentation made by any student, regardless of subdiscipline, at the annual meeting. Hall’s poster, “The Effectiveness of Tomato Plants (Solanum lycopersicum) Modified With a Hessian Fly-Responsive (Hfr) Gene Against Phloem-Feeding and Chewing Insects,” was presented with his advisors Dr. David Puthoff and Dr. Sunshine Brosi.

The Julia F. Morton Poster Award was given to Frostburg resident Amanda Vickers, a graduate student in the Applied Ecology and Conservation Biology program and co-advised by Puthoff and Brosi, for her poster “Chromatographic Quantification of Medicinal Compounds in Flowering and Non-flowering Wild-Harvested Actaea racemosa L.” The award, presented by the Society for Economic Botany, is for the best poster at the annual meeting for students or young professionals (five years or less post-doctoral experience). The winner receives an award certificate and $500.

In addition, Robbie Kutchman of Oakland, also in the graduate program, presented a poster on “The Impact of Artificial Shade Cloth and Substrate on the Establishment of Cultivated Actaea racemosa L. in Western Maryland, USA.”

Hall, Vickers and Kutchman and undergraduate ethnobotany major Chris Massimino of Carnegie, Pa., won travel awards to attend. The awards were part of Brosi’s National Science Foundation-funded project, The Open Science Network in Ethnobiology. Additional research and travel support were provided by the Appalachian Center for Ethnobotanical Studies.

FSU, in collaboration with Allegany College of Maryland, will host the 2012 Annual Meeting of the International Society for Economic Botany June 2 through 7 on FSU’s campus, with the theme of Ethnobotany of Mountain Cultures.