Jing Dai Wins National Award at the Annual Conference of the North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture (NACTA)
Jing Dai, Penn State, received the NACTA Graduate Student Teacher Award at the Annual Conference of the North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture held at Utah State University, June 2008. The theme for the Conference was “Retaining the Best.” The purpose of the annual conference is to provide for professional advancement of faculty engaged in classroom teaching. Participants have the opportunity to share teaching methods, philosophies, and styles of instruction.
Jing Dai was born on Jan 7, 1982, in Leshan City, Sichuan Province, China. Situated at the confluence of three branches of the Yangtze River, Leshan City is famous for the largest stone Buddha sculpture in the world. It was among those waters and hills her deep love for nature originated. As she grew up, she became especially interested in agriculture-related sciences.
In 2004, Jing earned her BS degree in Agronomy from China Agricultural University (the former Beijing Agricultural University), where she was exposed to advanced corn/wheat breeding research and studied genes encoding wheat DNA methyltransferase for her bachelor’s thesis. Jing then moved to the Penn State to characterize the salinity tolerance of annual bluegrass and earned her MS degree in Agronomy in 2006. Currently, Jing is a Ph.D. candidate in Agronomy (minor in Statistics) at Penn State, working on improving creeping bentgrass nitrogen fertility regimes for optimized turfgrass quality and reduced environmental impact. Her advisor is Dr. Max Schlossberg, associate professor of Turfgrass Nutrition / Soil Fertility.
As a graduate assistant, Jing takes great joy in teaching turfgrass and soil sciences. She has assisted in the instruction of four courses and four lab sections in three years. Not only is she intensively involved in classroom teaching, she also gives review sessions and constructs teaching Web sites to better help students. She also co-developed an annual bluegrass module for Penn State turfgrass online education. Jing continues to contribute to quality teaching and research at Penn State.