Continuing with our celebration of this year’s CALS Award recipients, we are sharing information about the winners of the Pound Extension Award and the Pound Research Award this week. These awards are supported by an educational development fund created to honor former CALS Dean Glenn S. Pound upon his retirement in 1979.

Paul D. Mitchell

Paul D. Mitchell, professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, received the Pound Extension Award. His Extension program focuses on the economics of agriculture.

Paul provides outstanding leadership and research support to many colleagues in CALS and the Division of Extension and has several high-quality journal articles and award-winning Extension materials. His publications, focusing on pest management in crop production, and the economic implications of agricultural policy are highly valued and have been integrated into many Extension programs.

Paul’s Extension presentations and written materials show a wide range of work that he presents at Extension-sponsored programs, in-service opportunities and events for other organizations that partner with Extension. His leadership, along with his national reputation, make him a vital part of the UW–Madison faculty.

Vatsan Raman

Vatsan Raman, assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry, was the recipient of the Pound Research Award. Since joining the department, Vatsan has established an impressive multidisciplinary research program in CALS.

Vatsan’s research program is aimed at developing technologies at the interface of biochemistry, microbiology, computation and engineering. One focus of his research is understanding and designing allosteric proteins, which are important for cellular function and of great interest to biological engineers.

He also focuses his research on bacteriophages and their roles in genome engineering. Vatsan and his colleagues developed a method for genome engineering called ORACLE — Optimized Recombination, Accumulation and Library Expression — which has been considered a breakthrough in this field.

In addition to his outstanding research contributions, Vatsan has engaged in a remarkable amount of science outreach, and his expertise and research leadership has been acknowledged at the national level.