By Faith Peppers
University of
Georgia

Five University of Georgia faculty members received the
prestigious D.W. Brooks Awards for Excellence Oct. 18 in Athens,
Ga.

The $5,000 annual awards recognize UGA College of Agricultural
and Environmental Sciences educators and researchers who excel
in
teaching, research, extension and public service extension
programs. An award for international agriculture is given in
even-numbered years.

The 2004 winners are Jeffrey
Dorfman, teaching; Paul
Bertsch, research; Bill
Hurst, extension; Debbie
Purvis, public service extension programs; and Jack
Houston, international agriculture.

The CAES sponsors the annual lecture and awards in memory of
D.W.
Brooks, founder of Gold Kist, Inc., and Cotton States Mutual
Insurance Companies.

Mark Drabenstott, vice president and director of the Center for
the Study of Rural America at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas
City, delivered the 2004 D.W. Brooks Lecture, “The Brave New
World for Land-grant Universities.”

Dorfman,
an outstanding teacher of agricultural and applied economics,
has
received the department’s graduate teaching award in 1991 and
1992 and undergraduate teaching award in 1998, 2001 and 2003.

In 2004, he was presented the Southern Agricultural Economics
Association Distinguished Teaching of a Course Award for his
course, “The Economics of Agricultural Processing and
Marketing.”

This course helps prepare students to work in food industry
jobs.
They learn to apply economic principles to real-world
situations.
The course prepares them to solve economic and management
problems they will likely face in the food industry.

Bertsch
is a professor of soil physical chemistry and mineralogy and
director of the Savannah River Ecology Lab. His research on
aluminum chemistry has improved scientists’ understanding of the
element’s role in soil chemistry and plant and animal
toxicity.

His extensive work on delineating the chemical speciation, or
molecular form of atoms, of environmental contaminants and on
understanding the connection between chemical speciation and the
mobility, bioavailability and toxicity of contaminants is widely
recognized as pioneering.

It has provided the basis of a new research area now generally
known as molecular environmental science.

Hurst,
an extension food scientist, has been a leader in developing
food
safety training and workshop materials for the fresh and
fresh-cut produce industries for more than 20 years.

His work with the Georgia Department of Agriculture and other
entities is recognized nationwide. He developed the Georgia
State
“Fresh Produce Safety Team” and the nation’s first GAPs (Good
Agricultural Practices) short course for the fresh produce
industry.

Hurst’s Georgia GAPs Food Safety Program for Georgia produce
growers, packers and shippers program saved thousands of dollars
in third-party audit fees for the industry. It is a model for
other states that are working to establish similar programs.

Purvis,
an extension agent in Colquitt County, is involved in projects
such as “Smart Kids Fight BAC,” a multistate food safety
curriculum, and the Faculty Research Grant Pilot Study, a
profile
and needs assessment of the Latino migrant population.

She has trained a bilingual staff and now offers food service
employees a state-required food handler certification training
in
both Spanish and English.

She led in procuring a grant for “Voz de la Familia,” a
family-centered community outreach program, and has taught
nutrition, food safety and chronic disease prevention to nearly
1,000 Latino farm workers since 2002.

Houston
has taught agricultural and applied economics at UGA since 1984.
Before that, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi and then
spent nine years with the Malawi Ministry of Agriculture. He
trained more than 2,000 agricultural extension personnel and led
in planning and developing the curriculum of a new college of
natural resources.

At UGA, Houston has been the interim director of the African
studies program. He developed the proposal to advance the
program
into a university-wide Institute of African Studies in 2001.

Houston directs his department’s first study-abroad course, the
International Agribusiness Marketing and Management course takes
at the University of Veracruz, Mexico.

(Faith Peppers is a news editor with the University of
Georgia
College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)