Bezanilla named an 'Emerging Scholar' by Diverse magazine

Magdalena Bezanilla, associate professor of Biology, is among 12 "Emerging Scholars" profiled in the Jan. 5 issue of the magazine Diverse: Issues In Higher Education.

Annually, Diverse profiles 12 "under 40" scholars from around the country who are making their mark in the academy through teaching, research and service. Each scholar is selected based on research, educational background, publishing record, teaching record, competitiveness of field of study, and uniqueness of field of study.

Bezanilla, who joined the faculty in 2005, studies the biology of plant cells to discover how they grow. "My lab is interested in understanding how molecules inside the cell help to shape the cell and give the cell its final form," she says in the profile, which notes that she and her colleagues recently pioneered a technique they call multigene silencing to simultaneously silence genes in a multicellular organism.

Last year, Bezanilla received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. The honor is coordinated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She also received the 2010 Women in Cell Biology Junior Career Recognition Award from the American Society for Cell Biology.

Her other honors include a Lucile Packard Foundation grant and a Faculty Early Career Development award from the National Science Foundation.

Bezanilla was nominated for recognition as a Diverse Emerging Scholar by Rolf Karlstrom, who chairs the Biology Department.

Bezanilla has taken "significant risk" in her research, he said, by studying cell polarity in a non-vascular plant, the moss Physcomitrella patens. "Staking her career on a nonconventional research organism and reaping exceptional insights therefrom, exemplify [her] brilliant and courageous spirit," said Karlstrom.

More Information

Diverse magazine, Jan. 5, 2012

January 9, 2012.

E-mail story to a friendPrinter-friendly version

/more people/