Golden Fellowship Recipients of 2013-14 Honor Namesake at Reception

The fellowship was created in 1981 by Mrs. Golden–who simply goes by Kay–and friends, after her husband, Bill Golden, passed away in a plane accident in 1978. Since its establishment, the Golden Fellowship has contributed to countless graduate students' research in rice production technology.

Kay visits campus annually to meet the new year's fellows. This year, Kay joined fellows Daniel Cathey (Horticulture and Agronomy), Mitchell Harkenrider (Plant Biology), Gena Hoffman (Plant Biology), and Emilie Kirk (Soils and Biogeochemistry) to hear about the research they have been conducting. Over the years, fellows' research interests change and transform, but Kay always comes back to share her and Bill's old legacy story with the recipients.

Over the course of the intimate two-hour reception, Kay spoke about her most cherished memories of traveling and living abroad for 15 years with Bill, and shared how they first met: she and Bill were both working at UC extension when he asked her out on the first date to go visit the rice paddies and look for frogs. The rest was history.

About Their Research

Daniel Cathey has a strong desire to pursue research that will help create a more sustainable and equitable world. He feels that agriculture is the base of a society and if people do not fear hunger, then the world will see more peace. He wants to develop innovative solutions that will help the poor and hungry become more self-sufficient. His research investigates the use of a novel form of fertilizer, specifically, working with anaerobically digested organic waste. He is investigating how different forms and concentrations of this fertilizer may be utilized to provide nutrition to crops; he is looking at whether there may be any phytotoxic effects when using the fertilizer and how this fertilizer will affect yield. "Receiving the fellowship has been a great encouragement to me. It has allowed me to focus on research that will hopefully benefit agriculture worldwide. The fellowship has enabled me to reach out to various partners in industry and develop a project that will further drive the rest of my academic and professional career."

Mitchell Harkenrider's work centers on the characterization of a complex signaling network regulating plant stress and health. To build a body of knowledge about plant mechanisms regulating pathogen resistance, Mitch is elucidating the role of a protein kinase associated with the plant cell wall. Overall, his mission is to improve crop varieties that thrive under an array of stresses, improve the consistency of production, and ultimately improve lives.  "My doctoral work aims to understand the genetic basis of resistance to pests and pathogens in rice. The Golden Fellowship has given me the support to pursue my research goals full time. My mission is to help develop rice varieties that thrive under an array of stresses and improve the consistency of rice production in at-risk regions of the globe."

Gena Hoffman's current project focuses on immune responses in rice as a model system for cereal crops. Her research goal is to identify novel regulators of PRR-mediated (pattern recognition receptor-mediated) immune responses in rice based on a genome-scale network of rice genes established by Dr. Pamela Ronald's lab called RiceNet. She will identify and validate subnetworks (i.e., sets of genes) that mediate PRR-mediated immune responses in rice. Her project will lead to the development of new strategies for engineering pathogen resistance in cereal crops. She is motivated to break the cycle of malnutrition and disease in developing countries by increasing access to proper nutrition through plant breeding. She also works to increase public understanding of new agricultural technologies.
"The Golden Fellowship has allowed me to work toward identifying and characterizing genes involved in innate immunity of rice. I am tremendously grateful for this support. I value the opportunity to impact others in the rice research community."

Emilie Kirk has been working in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta on a project assessing the use of rice cultivation to conserve peat soils and stop subsidence there. Her research is developing a baseline for efficient rice management to reduce subsidence in the region. She is also conducting outreach as part of her project with high school students from Oakley, CA, and setting up a demonstration rice field and learning lab with them. She feels deeply committed to working in rice systems and continuing to be a part of a global community working towards food security and sustainability.  "The Golden Fellowship allowed me to focus on my field research here in California and pursue an extracurricular internship in Laos as well after my fieldwork was completed here. I am very grateful to have this level of support for my academic and professional development!"

Whitney Brim-DeForest currently works at the Rice Experiment Station in Biggs, CA, where she runs the Weed Science field program for Dr. Albert Fischer, conducting farmer-directed research on topics including herbicide resistance and screening as well as field trials for different management systems. For her Ph.D. research, she is evaluating the impact of reduced irrigation on weed emergence and population dynamics in California rice. She is working on building a model that will allow farmers to better predict weed emergence in different irrigation systems, enabling them to time weed management interventions, as well as to control herbicide-resistant weeds. The models have the potential to be applied to other systems, including other rice systems and other crops. She hopes to continue in extension and teaching after completing her degree. "The Golden Fellowship has allowed me to remain at UC Davis to do my Ph.D. (I started as a M.S. student), and it has given me the opportunity to carry out research in a field that I am very passionate about – weed science in rice."

In Photo: Mrs. Kay Golden featured in center; L-R Mitchell Harkenrider, Dean Jeffery Gibeling, Daniel Cathey, Gena Hoffman. Fellows not pictured: Emilie Kirk, Whitney Brim-DeForest.

Secondary Categories

General News