Science and Technology
Watson, four other female scientists produce comprehensive analysis of sunflower family
Linda Watson, an Oklahoma State University professor in the Department of Plant Biology, Ecology, and Evolution, is one of five female scientists who have produced a comprehensive analysis of genomic-scale data to understand the historical biogeography of the Asteraceae, also known as the sunflower or daisy family. Watson, president of the Botanical Society of America, collaborated with researchers from the University of Memphis and the Smithsonian Institution to publish “A fully resolved backbone phylogeny reveals numerous dispersals and explosive diversifications throughout the history of Asteraceae” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
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OSU received a $3.1 million grant for forage sorghum research.
At Oklahoma State University, Alannah Templon has been on a part of the OSU Dance Company and also the OSU Tap Company. She has even served as president of the OSU Dance Company for the last two years. She has double majors in biology and sociology with a minor in dance.
For Dr. Sabiha Parveen, it wasn’t so much a question of what she’d study, but rather how she’d go about it. So after graduating from the University of Calcutta in her home country of India and working for a year in audiology and speech-language pathology, she headed to Bowling Green State University in Ohio for postgraduate work. Although Parveen had initially wanted to focus her studies on aphasia and stroke, her mentor presented another option: Parkinson’s disease.
Dr. Kalianne Neumann, OSU assistant professor of educational technology, learned about an instructional strategy for teaching English sentence structure to Deaf students, where students color coded the parts of speech. Although many classrooms have adopted Google technologies, there was not a Google tool to easily color code online.
Oklahoma State University created the Oklahoma Center for Evolutionary Analysis, or OCEAN, which hosts an annual conference called the Flyover State Scientists Integrating Evolution, or FOSSIL. OCEAN’s critical mass of social science researchers makes it one of fewer than five such centers in the entire U.S. where students receive training in and exposure to evolutionary approaches to cognition and behavior.
Oklahoma State University and alumni Kayleen and Larry Ferguson announced a $50 million gift from the Ferguson Family Foundation that will transform the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources in a variety of ways, including a new name. Pending approval next week from the Oklahoma A&M Board of Regents, the college will be renamed the Ferguson College of Agriculture in recognition of the gift, which is among the largest in OSU’s nearly 130-year history.