The Mary E. Case Award for Excellence in Teaching was established in 2014 to honor the contributions of Mary Case to the Department of Genetics at the University of Georgia. Mary Case was born on December 10, 1925, in Crawfordsville, Indiana. She received her B.A. in Biology from Maryville College in Tennessee and an M.A. in Botany from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She went on to earn her Ph.D., under the direction of Norman Giles, at Yale University in 1957. She remained at Yale as a Lecturer until being recruited to UGA in 1972, where she was appointed an Associate Professor of Zoology. In 1980, she started as a member of the newly-formed Department of Molecular and Population Genetics and was promoted to Professor of Genetics in 1985. Case has focused most of her research career on quinic acid metabolism in Neurospora crassa, publishing more than 45 articles. She is a pioneer in the field of molecular genetics who made many critical contributions to our understanding of cellular metabolism, from the level of transcriptional regulation to the assembly of multienzyme complexes. Now an emerita member of the department, she continues to do research, currently in collaboration with Jonathan Arnold, a computational biologist. Mary E. Case Award for Excellence in Teaching 2023 Samantha Day, Audrey Ward, Shuang Yang 2022 Anna Brinck 2021 Daniel Shaw 2020 Margot Popecki 2019 Rachel MacTavish 2018 Holly McQueary 2017 A. Kelly Lane 2016 Nick Batora & Nick Arthur 2015 Christy Hartman & Katie Bockrath 2014 Louisa Carter Staton Louisa, graduated in 2014, is the first to be honored with this award due to her outstanding contribution over the years to teaching in the Department of Genetics.
