Sandra Rossie, a faculty member since 1991, has been promoted to professor.

Clint Chapple has been appointed a Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry. Chapple’s research focuses on understanding and manipulating lignin, a compound that contributes to plants’ structural strength but which hinders conversion of plants into other materials. Chapple has been a faculty member since 1993.

The department has established the John V. Osmun Endowed Professorship to honor the contributions of Osmun, professor emeritus of entomology and former department head, who retired in 1987. Osmun was a pioneering advocate of education and training in the pest control industry. The department established the professorship, in partnership with pest control companies, distributors and others, to perform research that is immediately applicable to the pest control industry.

Greg Hunt, an associate professor, is the winner of the 2007 J.I. Hambleton Award from the Eastern Apicultural Society of North America in recognition of his research in apiculture (beekeeping). Hunt has been a faculty member since 1995.

Thomas J. Henry, BS ’71, is the 2007 winner of the John V. Osmun Alumni Professional Achievement Award in Entomology. After graduating from Purdue, he worked for a pest control company and then as a regulatory entomologist in state government for eight years before becoming a research entomologist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Washington, D.C. He will receive the award at a ceremony at 2 p.m. Oct. 26 in Pfendler Hall.

Buckzowski

A six-member team received the Entomology Educational Project Award from the Board Certified Entomologists of Mid-America for the Purdue Extension publication Corn & Soybean Field Guide (2007 Edition). Award recipients are Corey Gerber, BS ’93, MS ’95, PhD ’03, director of the Crop Diagnostic and Research Center; John Obermeyer, the integrated pest management supervisor; Christian Krupke, assistant professor; Judy Loven, a wildlife biologist; and Jamal Faghihi, PhD ’83, a research nematologist. The annually updated publication is an in-field reference on topics related to corn and soybean production. This revision has new pictures of weeds, insects and diseases. More than 51,000 copies of the 2007 edition have been sold.

Wang

Grzegorz Buczkowski and Changlu Wang are new research assistant professors. Buczkowski came to Purdue in June 2004 as a research scientist and was appointed research faculty in January 2007. He specializes in urban entomology with a focus on social insects.

Wang joined the department in 2002 as a research associate. He earned his doctorate from West Virginia University and had been manager of sponsored product research at the Center for Urban and Industrial Pest Management. His research interests are management of urban pests, ecology of ants, termites and cockroaches, and invasive red fire ants in China.

Kim

Kevin Keener, associate professor, Extension specialist and food process engineer, is the winner of the Nolan Mitchell Young Extension Worker Award from the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers. The award recognizes outstanding success in motivating people to acquire knowledge and skills for the understanding of agricultural operations. Keener, a faculty member since 2005, was recognized for his Extension program about food sanitation, regulatory compliance and food processing technologies for various food industries.

Zhang

Kee-Hong Kim has joined the faculty as an assistant professor. His areas of specialization are bioactive food components, obesity biology, and transcriptional and signaling regulation of the differentiation program and inflammatory response of adipocytes. Previously, Kim was an assistant professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

Genyi Zhang has been appointed assistant research professor specializing in carbohydrate nutrition and physiological responses, the structure and mechanism of slowly digestible starch, and nanotechnology to deliver functional elements in food products. Zhang was previously an assistant professor of food science and technology at Southern Yangtze University, Wuxi, China.

Goforth

Brian Miller, BS ’80, MS ’83, has been appointed director of the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant College Program. He previously was the program’s outreach coordinator and associate director. Miller joined the department in 1988 as a wildlife Extension specialist. Associate professor Rick Farnsworth is the associate director of Extension for Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant. He has been a faculty member since 2003.

Reuben R. Goforth and Michael R. Saunders have been appointed assistant professors, and Shaun P. Young has been appointed a visiting assistant professor.

Saunders

Goforth has been a faculty member in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Michigan State University since 2005. His research interests include aquatic ecology; fish and insect species and communities in streams, large rivers, inland lakes and Great Lakes nearshore areas; and ecological mechanisms that support and sustain native biodiversity.

Saunders earned his PhD from the University of Maine in forest resources in 2006 and has been a forest biometrician with the University of Maine Cooperative Forestry Research Unit. His research interests include ecological forestry; growth and yield modeling; stand dynamics in hardwood forests; incorporating variability into forestry prescriptions; and spatial structure of forests.

Young

Young received his PhD in fisheries sciences in 2005 from Clemson University, where his research focused on fish ecology and behavior in altered river systems.

Jules Janick, the James Troop Distinguished Professor of Horticulture, received an honorary doctorate at the Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on June 3. Janick was honored for his pioneering insights and discoveries that have had a significant impact on biotechnology, breeding and genetics of new food crops, and medicinal drug development.

Lopez

Roberto Lopez has joined the department as an assistant professor after earning his PhD from Michigan State University earlier this year. He specializes in floriculture Extension, research and teaching. His research focuses on how environmental stresses affect plant growth, development, quality and subsequent crop performance.

Knobloch

Neil Knobloch is a new assistant professor. He previously was an assistant professor of agricultural education at the University of Illinois. He earned his doctorate in agricultural education in 2002 from Ohio State University, and he specializes in nonformal life science education.