With thanks to everyone that applied, we are thrilled to introduce the winners of the 2024 Black in Plant Science Research Excellence Awards. The award recognises talented early career Black or Black heritage researchers working with plants in UK institutions. Both awardees will receive funding to present their work at an International conference this summer. They will also be invited to attend and present at the very first Black in Plant Science Conference in October!
The Winners
Bernice Waweru
Bernice Waweru is a PhD student at John Innes Centre (University of East Anglia), she is originally from Kenya where she completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She has already established a long track record of research excellence – studying a variety of different genomes, assembling those genomes and annotating them.
She has been a winner of several awards, including the Borlaug-LEAP fellowship. Additionally, she was part of a select team of fellows awarded a USAID grant to collate, manage reviews and publish a collection of research articles from across various cohorts of Borlaug-LEAP fellows. This work was published in 2019 as a special issue in the African Journal of Food, Agriculture Nutrition and Development.
Bernice has been involved in numerous EDI activities throughout her career, being a voice for gender equality in recruitment. She is currently at the John Innes Centre as part of the Rosalind Franklin Women in Wheat Champions programme as a mentee and is an active member of the Women in Crop Science network.
Jade Bleau
Jade Bleau, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the University of Dundee/James Hutton Institute. After finishing her BSc at the University of Leeds, she completed her MRes in Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of Sheffield (UK), working with the vegetable breeding company Enza Zaden (Netherlands). She completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh and is currently at the University of Dundee, researching the molecular mechanisms behind plant-aphid interactions.
Jade is one of the founding members of Black Botanists Week, a campaign first organised in 2020 to promote, encourage, create a safe space for, and find more Black people who love plants across the globe. In partnership with Holden Arboretum the Black Botanist Week network produced a seminar series called Growing Black Roots: The Black Botanical Legacy which consists of eleven lectures, one of which is presented by Jade.
As well as this, Jade contributed significantly to the inception of the Black in Plant Science Network and continues to serve as a valued member of the committee.
The Runners-up
We would also like to give a special mention to our runners up who also demonstrated notable achievements in research.
Sibongile Zimba is a final year PhD student in Plant Science at the University of Leeds. Her PhD project is interdisciplinary research on understanding the plant architectural traits and molecular developmental pathways underlying drought tolerance in nutritious, climate-smart crops. As an Early Career Researcher, she has collaborated with multiple excellent leaders in the field and co-authored several relevant published papers.
Charlene Dambire, PhD is a research fellow at the University of Nottingham working on defining a new realm of proteolysis activated protein function. In 2022, Charlene established the Ideas 2 Careers platform, a mentorship initiative for young Zimbabwean women, hosted on Facebook in collaboration with professionals across various fields in Zimbabwe. She continues to be a mentor and trains research staff at the University of Nottingham.