About Rodney Mauricio

Rodney with Sarra and Maggie on Lake Michigan
Rodney Mauricio is an Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics at the University of Georgia. He also holds an adjunct appointment in the Department of Plant Biology. Rodney has been widely recognized for his teaching and mentorship at the University of Georgia: he won the University-wide teaching award, the Richard B. Russell Teaching Award, as well as the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences "Excellence in Teaching Award." Undergraduates selected him as the 2003 Outstanding Academic Adviser in the Franklin College. He was recently recognized with the Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award by the Center for Undergraduate Research Opportunities at University of Georgia.

Rodney received an AB., magna cum laude with highest honors in Biology, from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachussetts in 1988, where he worked with Deane Bowers and Fakhri Bazzaz. Before heading to graduate school, he worked for Terry Chapin in Alaska, then moved to Brazil and Costa Rica for a year to do independent research on tropical forest conservation.

As a graduate student of Mark Rausher's in the Department of Zoology at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, he moonlighted several times as an Amazon River naturalist in Peru and was a member of the Summer 1990 OTS Tropical Ecology class. In 1990, in an attempt to avoid working in the summer heat of North Carolina, he started working on natural populations of a small weedy annual, Arabidopsis thaliana, the mouse-ear cress. Rodney received his Ph.D from Duke and, with a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellowship in Molecular Evolution in hand, moved to the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago where he worked with Joy Bergelson and Marty Kreitman. In 1998, Rodney was awarded the Young Investigators' Prize by the American Society of Naturalists.