Biologist wins Young Scientist Award

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Xu_Jianping.jpg” caption=”Jianping Xu in his lab in the Life Sciences Building. Photo credit: Chantall Van Raay”]Months shy of his 40th birthday, McMaster biologist Jianping Xu has received a Robert Haynes Young Scientist Award from the Genetics Society of Canada.
Receiving the award is not surprising, considering the length of his achievements is greater than his age.
In addition to having acted as a consultant on fungal contamination in civilian residences and the Canadian military, Xu has reviewed more than 30 papers for 11 high quality journals, he has been an ad hoc reviewer for NSERC Discovery, Idea to Innovation, and Strategic
grants, and is a member of the Antimicrobial Research Centre and the Origins Institute at McMaster. As well, he organized the 25th Great Lakes Winter Mycology Conference this past February and he is a member of the Medical and Environmental Mycology Committee of the Mycological Society of America. He also is a recipient of a Premiers
Research Excellence Award, an Ontario Graduate scholarship and a Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada postgraduate scholarship.
“I feel extremely honoured and very privileged to receive this award,” said Xu. “I also think this award is very good for McMaster.”
The award recognizes a young scientist who has made notable original research in genetics during the 15 years following the completion of a first degree. Xu's current research attempts to understand the origins and maintenance of genetic variation in microorganisms, with a special emphasis on fungi. He examines microbial populations from the environment, clinics, and laboratory to address a variety of questions, including the rate and effect of spontaneous mutations on medically important traits; the spread of microbes in natural environments and human populations; – the origins of novel strains and species, and the origin and evolution of sex. His research uses microbiological, molecular as well as quantitative genetic tools.
Xu began his career in 1983 as a summer research student in microbiology at Jiangxi Agricultural University. He then advanced to research assistant at the Institute of Agricultural Microbiology in China in 1988 and from 1989 to 1991, was a research scientist at the Institute of Microbiology in China. In 1991, he became a research assistant at the Canada Agriculture Research Station in Saskatoon. That same year, he started his graduate training at the University of Toronto. He became a research associate at Duke University in 1997 and in 2000 was hired as an assistant professor of biology at McMaster.
The Young Scientist Award consists of a citation and a plaque. Xu was invited to present an honorary lecture titled “Mitochondrial Inheritance in A Fungus” at the Annual Meeting of the Society recently. McMaster biologist Brian Golding also won the award in 1989 when he was a faculty member at York University.