image: Katherine Borkovich is a professor of plant pathology at UC Riverside. view more
Credit: I. Pittalwala
RIVERSIDE, Calif. (http://www.ucr.edu) -- Katherine Borkovich, a professor and chair of the UC Riverside Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.
The academy, the leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology, recognizes excellence, originality, and leadership in the microbiological sciences. She will be recognized at the annual American Society for Microbiology Conference June 2 in New Orleans.
Borkovich, who is also a professor at UC Riverside's Institute for Integrative Genome Biology, is focused on functional genomics and the signaling pathways used by filamentous fungi to response to the environment, with the goal of identifying genes that control growth, development and pathogenesis.
She is being honored for her research into environmental sensing by heterotrimeric G proteins in fungi, contributions to fungal genomics, leadership of microbiology undergraduate and graduate programs, and for teaching a research-based laboratory course for the microbiology major at UC Riverside.
She was instrumental in establishment of the microbiology undergraduate major and reinstatement of the microbiology graduate program at UC Riverside. She was recognized with the 2016 campus Distinguished Teaching Award for her teaching of a research-based course for the Microbiology major, Experimental Microbiology.
Borkovich received her Ph.D. from UCLA and did postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago and Caltech.
###