2012 Fellow Award

The Fellow Award recognizes current members of the SIVB who have been active members for at least 10 years.  A Fellow has made outstanding contributions in their area of specialization or discipline to include research, teaching, and administration in public, government, academic, or private industry activities.  The Society for In Vitro Biology honored Dannette Connor-Ward, Tetsuji Okamoto, and Peggy J. Ozias-Akins with Fellow Awards at the 2012 World Congress on In Vitro Biology.  This issue of the In Vitro Report will highlight Dr. Dannette Connor-Ward.  Dr. Tetsuji Okamoto and Dr. Peggy J. Ozias-Akins will be highlighted in upcoming issues of the In Vitro Report.

Dannette Connor-Ward

Dannette V. Connor-Ward was a recipient of the SIVB Fellow Award at the 2012 meeting in Bellevue, WA.  To capture the highlights of her career which led to this honor, what could be simpler or more fitting than to point to the March 30, 2009 issue of People magazine – Dannette  is a “Hero Among Us” (http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20271176,00.html).

Throughout her 35+ year professional career, Dannette has worked tirelessly and passionately in the area of scientific education of school children.  The People article focuses on Dannette’s role in launching the first agricultural biotechnology program for high school students in St. Louis, at the inner-city Clyde C. Miller Career Academy.  In addition to raising $10,000 to start the program, she mentored students and raised funds to send them to the annual Future Farmers of America convention in Kansas City.  At the FFA convention, Dannette organized the “Teachers Lounge”, where Ag Education teachers from across the country could come to get the latest biotech education information and take it back to their classrooms.  This expanded Dannette’s sphere of influence from ~100 students at the Clyde C. Miller Academy to more than 300,000 in Ag Ed classes nationwide.

Locally, Dannette has worked with the Girl Scouts of Greater St. Louis to provide workshops for teachers and students to improve scientific literacy among young women, especially minority women.  These workshops have reached over 700 girls and advisors.  She is also an adjunct professor of biotechnology at the St. Louis Community College at Florissant Valley, where she developed and taught a course in advanced topics in biotechnology.  She helped to obtain and develop curricula for a mobile education unit, which has received requests from across the country for campus visits.

At the national level, in addition to the FFA “Teachers Lounge” and the SLCC-Flo Valley mobile biotechnology unit, Dannette served as an industry advisor for the implementation of a B.S. degree program in Agricultural Biotechnology at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Cobleskill.

Given her interest in youth education, it’s not surprising that Dannette’s service to SIVB includes over 10 years on the Education Committee, serving as Co-chair from 1998-2000.  She also served for 5 years on the Phillip White Award Committee, and has been a member of both the Program Planning and Local Arrangements Committees.  She has been a loyal member of the Society for over 30 years, including regular attendance at the annual meetings.

Dannette’s own scientific education began on the farm where she grew up, and was formalized at Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia where she received her B.S. in Biology in 1974.  She began working at Monsanto Company in St. Louis shortly after finishing college in 1974, and continued until her retirement in 2011.  While working at Monsanto, she received her M.S. in Biology from the University of Missouri (1981).

Scientifically, Dannette is best known for her work on soybean regeneration and transformation.  Working with Dr. Maud Hinchee and others, Dannette produced the world’s first transgenic soybean plant using Agrobacterium (1989; Bio/Technology 6: 915-922), and also the first Roundup® tolerant soybean plant using this technology.  She trained and led a team of 7 researchers on commercial transgenic soybean production, and transferred the technology to another research facility.  Her skills and technical contributions extend far beyond soybean, and include work on nuclear transformation of sugarbeet and cotton, and plastid transformation of tobacco.  She established methods for Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of elite sugarbeet varieties, and successfully transferred the technology to partners in Europe.  In addition to six issued patents on soybean transformation, Dannette is a co-inventor on an issued patent on improvements in cotton transformation.  Dannette spent a short period of her Monsanto career on plastid transformation, during which she and her colleagues improved tobacco plastid transformation frequency more than 5-fold, and produced transplastomic plants expressing human therapeutic proteins (2000; Nature Biotechnology 18: 333-338).

Not surprisingly based on her many professional contributions, Dannette has a long list of honors and awards, including:  1) Excellence in Science Award (1988; from St. Louis American Newspaper, in recognition of minorities in the St. Louis area who have made significant contributions in their fields;  2) Featured in Black Enterprise Magazine (Feb. 1990;  “A Futurist of Technology and Science”);  3) Selected for “Wall of Scientists” at the St. Louis Science Center (1992-1997; one of only 25 area scientists bestowed this honor);  4) Six-time winner of the prestigious Monsanto Achievement Award (1983, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1994, 1995);  5) two-time winner of the YWCA Leadership Award (1989, 2008);  6)  two-time winner of the Monsanto Pledge Award (2003, 2008);  and last but not least, 7) establishment of the Dannette Ward Science Education Grant by the Monsanto Fund.  The first of these yearly grants to enhance science and agricultural education were awarded in January 2012, with nine St. Louis area schools receiving a total of $8,000.

In closing, a paragraph from Wayne Parrott’s letter of support for the Fellow nomination says it all:  “As opposed to most people who have received the Fellow award from SIVB, Dannette was not a project leader in industry, nor did she climb the ranks in academia.  Instead, in her own way, she showed that any one can make a difference in science and in society, and in so doing, she made a bigger difference than most of us have.  That is why I admire her so much.”

Please join me in congratulating Dannette on her receipt of the SIVB Fellow Award.

Submitted by Charles L. Armstrong