Harvey Ballard teaching Ohio Flora course.
Dr. Harvey Ballard, Associate Professor of Environmental and Plant Biology, was among three Ohio University faculty awarded a spring 2013 Baker Fund award.
Ballard’s research, “Completing collaborative taxonomic studies of Latin American violets (Violaceae)” was awarded $12,000. He began studying tropical American violets while earning his doctoral degree in the 1990s and has since accrued a large amount of data on new species of the plant. Having nearly complete initial manuscripts that identify and describe the distribution and ecology of Latin American violets on a continental level, Ballard said he, along with colleague and postdoctoral researcher Juliana de Paula-Souza from University of São Paulo in São Paulo, Brazil, will use the Baker Fund award to travel to herbaria (plant museums) in the United States and Mexico that maintain some of the world’s largest collections of Latin American violets in 2013 and early 2014.
“Without this funding I could not afford to make these visits to finish my research on Latin American violets in the next year, especially with Juliana coming from Brazil to complete our collaborative research,” said Ballard. “The Baker Fund grant award has made it possible for me to move all these projects to completion and help advance the research program of a highly talented young investigator from Brazil as well.”
Comments