Each year, the Department recognizes a graduating Genetics major with the Cynthia Kenyon Outstanding Undergraduate Award. The Award goes to a student based on excellence in academics, research and leadership. Students are nominated by the Faculty and the Undergraduate Affairs Committee makes the final selection. The Award is presented at the annual Undergraduate Symposium held in April. The recipient receives a cash award and the student's name is engraved on a plaque that hangs in the Genetics office. The Faculty named the Award to honor a former UGA undergraduate, Cynthia Kenyon. Dr. Kenyon is the Herbert Boyer Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, and Director of the Larry L. Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging. She is a pioneer in aging research: in 1993, Kenyon showed that a single mutation could double the lifespan of the roundworm, C. elegans, sparking renewed interest in the molecular biology of aging. Kenyon earned her Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed her postdoctoral work with Sydney Brenner at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a former president of the Genetics Society of America. She has received many prizes for her work, including the King Faisal Prize for Medicine and the American Association of Medicine Award for Distinguished Research in the Biomedical Sciences. Past winners of the Cynthia Kenyon Outstanding Undergraduate Award 2008 Elizabeth A. Riggle   2007 Shannon Yu               2006 Rebekah L. Rogers   2005 Kelly S. Kopf               2004 Adrianne Nehrling   2003 Judson A. Lewis               2002 Frank Parker Hudson III   2001 Margaret Snoke               2000 Asa Cordle   2000 Holly Gooding