Harley King Recipient of 2011 Cosmos Scholars Grant and Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award

IBBR and MOCB graduate student Harley King, from the laboratory of Dr. Shunyuan Xiao (IBBR and the Department of Plant Sciences and Landscape Architecture) has been selected as the recipient of two distinguished awards. http://www.ibbr.umd.edu/sites/all/modules/wysiwyg/plugins/break/images/s..." title="" />First, King is one of twenty-four students granted a 2011 Cosmos Scholars Grant. His application entitled "Purification of the Haustorium and Extra-Haustorial Membrane in Arabidopsis thaliana" was selected from a pool of 164 metropolitan Washington applications. The Cosmos Foundation has been awarding grants since 1998. The program awards grants to graduate students to meet unexpected and unsupported aspects of their research.

King, also received a 2011 Distinguished Teaching Assistant Recognition Award for his exemplary performance as a teaching assistant in CMNS. This honor is presented annually by the Center for Teaching Excellence, the Dean for Undergraduate Studies, and the Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Maryland to the most outstanding teaching assistants within each department. Along with the other campus recipients, King was honored for this award at a special ceremony held at the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts.

King has worked in Dr. Xiao’s lab at IBBR since May of 2010. Research in the Xiao group is focused on the molecular mechanisms that plants have evolved to resist fungal pathogens. Ongoing work in the lab aims to understand a specific host-defense mechanism and the biogenesis of a novel fungal pathogenic mechanism, the haustorium. The goal of the lab is to engineer novel, host resistance against haustorium-forming pathogens in plants.