This spring two GDCB faculty, Dr. Ling Li, Associate Scientist and Adjunct Assistant Professor, and Dr. Bing Yang, Associate Professor, received awards in recognition of their individual achievements at ISU.

Dr. Ling Li is the recipient of the 2013 ISU Professional and Scientific Excellence Award. This award recognizes and honors professional and scientific staff members who have been employed by Iowa State University for more than five years and who have achieved excellence in their respective fields.

Dr. Li’s pursuit of knowledge relative to basic plant biology has involved a rare combination of metabolomics, transcriptomic, statistical and bioinformatics approaches. Her initial discovery and subsequent characterization of a small Arabidopsis gene dubbed ‘QQS’  has evolved into a well-published project that promises to increase protein content in soybean, potato, rice, and maize and is the basis for a pending patent as well as the source of substantial external funding. Although her contributions to translational research alone are outstanding, her significant voluntary teaching and mentorship activities demonstrate that she recognizes and supports the overall mission of Iowa State University.

Dr. Bing Yang is the recipient of the Liberal Arts and Science College’s Mid-Career Achievement in Research Award. This award recognizes faculty members who have a national or international reputation for outstanding contributions in research and/or artistic creativity at the mid-career stage.

Dr. Yang has developed a technology that is revolutionizing our ability to improve crop plants for the growing food, fuel and feed needs of this world. The technology was hailed by the prestigious journal “Nature Methods” as the “Method of Year” for 2011. The technology employs “TAL effectors” that are able to sort through thousands of genes in plant genomes to find their targets because they possess a barcode-reading devise that can read DNA sequences. Not only does this new technology provide access to previously inaccessible plant traits, but it does so in a benign way, unlike present-day transgenic technologies.