ChloroFilms was an international amateur plant biology film contest held four times between 2008 and 2010. The contest was created by Daniel Cosgrove at Pennsylvania State University with the goal of promoting independent videos that could both educate the audience about plant biology and capture their attention. It was funded by the American Society of Plant Biologists, the Botanical Society of America and the Canadian Botanical Association, and awarded over $13,000 in cash prizes in 2009 and 2010. [1] [2]
In the first contest, a grand prize of $1000 was awarded to "Fertile Eyes," a collaboration between Ela Lamblin and Anna Edlund which informed viewers about pollination and plant fertilization via the medium of song and dance. Runners up, each awarded $500, included "Fantastic Vesicle Traffic" by Daniel von Wangenheim, "La Bloomba" by Kris Holmes, "PSI — Are My Soybeans Wearing Different Genes?" by Burkhard Schulz, and "The Carnivorous Syndrome in 3D" by Mike Wilder. [3]
The second contest's grand prize winner was "Kenaf Callus Hoedown" by Noah Flanigan, a stop motion video that illustrates the process of cultivating plant tissue and features "lively and quirky music." The third contest's grand prize winner was "Arabidopsis Flower in 3D "by David Livingston, a technical video showing a 3D reconstruction of the internal anatomy of flowers [4] The fourth contest had a two-way tie for grand prize, awarded to "All Things Algae" by Terry Woodford–Thomas and "Seed Imbibition" by Robert Lewis Gerten. [5]
Bonnie Lynn Bassler is an American molecular biologist; the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology and chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University; and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She has researched cell-to-cell chemical communication in bacteria and discovered key insights into the mechanism by which bacteria communicate, known as quorum sensing. She has contributed to the idea that disruption of chemical signaling can be used as an antimicrobial therapy.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated mission of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the betterment of all humanity. AAAS was the first permanent organization established to promote science and engineering nationally and to represent the interests of American researchers from across all scientific fields. It is the world's largest general scientific society, with over 120,000 members, and is the publisher of the well-known scientific journal Science.
Joan E. Strassmann is an American evolutionary biologist and the Charles Rebstock Professor of Biology at the Washington University in St. Louis. She is known for her work on social evolution and particularly how cooperation prospers in the face of evolutionary conflicts.
Eva Nogales is a Spanish-American biophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she served as head of the Division of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Structural Biology of the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (2015–2020). She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
Nina Vsevolod Fedoroff is an American molecular biologist known for her research in life sciences and biotechnology, especially transposable elements or jumping genes. and plant stress response. In 2007, President George W. Bush awarded her the National Medal of Science, she is also a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the European Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Microbiology.
The Eberly College of Science is the science college of Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1859 by Jacob S. Whitman, professor of natural science. The College offers baccalaureate, master's, and doctoral degree programs in the basic sciences. It was named after Robert E. Eberly.
Réka Albert is a Romanian-Hungarian scientist. She is a distinguished professor of physics and adjunct professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University and is noted for the Barabási–Albert model and research into scale-free networks and Boolean modeling of biological systems.
Anurag Agrawal is an American professor of ecology, evolutionary biology, and entomology who has written over a 150 peer-reviewed articles, which earned him an h-index of 92. He is the author of a popular science book, Monarchs and Milkweeds from Princeton University Press, and is currently the James Alfred Perkins Professor of Environmental Studies at Cornell University.
Don W. Cleveland is an American cancer biologist and neurobiologist.
Yan Ning is a Chinese structural biologist. She has been serving as professor of life science at Tsinghua University since December 2022. She previously served as a professor at Princeton University from 2017 to 2022 and a faculty member at Tsinghua University from 2007 to 2017.
Matthew Johnson is a Reader in biochemistry at the University of Sheffield, England. He was the 2018 recipient of the Biochemical Society’s Colworth Medal.
Russell Lewis Jones is a Welsh botanist who researches plant communication molecules, particularly those that regulate the activity of seeds. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1972. From 1993–1994 he was the president of the American Society of Plant Physiologists. He was the editor of the Annual Review of Plant Physiology and Plant Molecular Biology from 1994–2001.
Keith A. Crandall is an American computational biologist, bioinformaticist, and population geneticist at George Washington University, where he is the founding director of the Computational Biology Institute, and professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics.
Craig E. Cameron is the chair of the department of microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Society for Microbiology.
Elizabeth Anna Ainsworth is an American plant physiologist currently employed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS). She also is an adjunct professor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and was awarded the 2018 Crop Science Society of America Presidential Award. She is known for her work concerning the effects of specific atmospheric pollutants, including ozone and carbon dioxide, on the productivity of selected major crops such as corn and soybeans.
Alice Cheung is an American biochemist who is a professor of molecular biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research considers the molecular and cellular biology of polarization. She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2020.
Erika L F. Holzbaur is an American biologist who is the William Maul Measey Professor of Physiology at University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. Her research considers the dynamics of organelle motility along cytoskeleton of cells. She is particularly interested in the molecular mechanisms that underpin neurodegenerative diseases.
Marisa Bartolomei is an American cell biologist, the Perelman Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology and Co-Director of the Epigenetics Institute at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research considers epigenetic processes including genomic imprinting. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.
Doris Wagner is an American biologist who is the Robert I. Williams Term Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research looks to better understand the structure-function relationships of plant cells. She established the Epigenomics of Plants International Consortium. Wagner is a Fellow of the American Society of Plant Biologists.