WWW.WAS.ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • DECEMBER 2012 11 At the World Aquaculture Society Conference in Prague (AQUA 2012) our society recognized and presented the Honorary Life Award to a truly outstanding scientist and member of the World Aquaculture Society — Dr. Peter Edwards. The Honorary Life Award represents the highest award of the society and recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of aquaculture. Peter Edwards is respected around the world and particularly in Asia where he has lived, conducted research, and trained aquaculture scientists for more than 30 years. Dr. Edwards served on the WAS Board of Directors from 1998-2001 and presented the keynote paper at the WAS conference in Beijing in 2002. Dr. Edwards has also served on the Technical Advisory Group of Aquaculture without Frontiers for many years. In 1981, Dr. Edwards established the aquaculture program at the Asian Institute of Technology. During his 26-year career at the Asian Institute of Technology, he trained numerous masters and doctoral students who now hold influential positions in government and the private sector in Asia. His students include ministers in Cambodia and Laos, deputy director-generals in Cambodia and Vietnam, university rectors and deans in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, and vice-presidents of large aquaculture companies in Indonesia and Thailand. The B.Sc. degree program that Dr. Edwards established in North Vietnam in the mid-1990s provided trained graduates that led to the recent expansion of aquaculture in northern Vietnam. The focus of Dr. Edwards’s career has been on the development of small-scale aquaculture technologies that are appropriate for the poor in rural communities. An emphasis on wastewaterfed aquaculture led to the development of systems to produce tilapia as a component of livestock and carnivorous fish feed in Southeast Asia. He also worked on the development of low-cost seed and grow-out technologies for small-scale aquaculture and integrated aquaculture-agriculture in Thailand and IndoChina. The impact of this research resulted in a major increase in tilapia production and expansion of tilapia hatcheries in Thailand. Peter Edwards Receives Honorary Life Award Peter Edwards gathering information from a fish-farming family in Bangladesh. Student Spotlight, continued from page 8 growth traits and gene loci affecting growth performance in aquatic organisms, Jung and his associate’s transcriptomic data will provide an invaluable resource for improving our understanding of a species’ genome structure. Zoe Featherstone received the award for best poster, which described “Virulence factors associated with aquatic Streptococcosis.” Zoe has just started the third year of her Ph.D. work at the Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling, Scotland. Her research focuses on simultaneous infections of Streptococcus agalactiae and Streptococcus iniae in Nile tilapia under the supervision of Dr. Mags Crumlish and Prof. James Turnbull. She has completed a M.Sc. in Sustainable Aquaculture at the University of Stirling and a B.Sc. in Bioveterinary Science at the University of Liverpool. The second-place award for best poster went to Fabiola Lafarga for her presentation titled “Developlment of EST-SSR molecular markers for red abalone Haliotis rufescens.” Recently, through the support of CONACYT-México and CONICYTChile scholarships programs, she obtained her doctoral degree in Aquaculture from a joint program with three universities in Chile: Universidad de Chile, Universidad Catolica del Norte and Pontificia Universidad de Valparaiso. Fabiola graduated with honors from the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California (UABC) with a bachelor’s degree in Oceanography. Years later she obtained a master’ degree in Coastal Oceanography supported by a CONACYT-México scholarship. Her graduate studies have involved aquaculture related projects ranging from the production of microalgae for feeding cultivated species to the study and manipulation of genetics to characterize and produce a hybrid between red and Japanese abalone (Haliotis rufescens and H. discus hannai). EDITORS NOTE: This summary of student awards from the WAS conference in Prague was submitted by Dr. Chris Green, Chair of the WAS Student Affairs Committee. Peter Edwards is respected around the world and particularly in Asia where he has lived, conducted research, and trained aquaculture scientists for more than 30 years.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjExNDY=