About Rodney Mauricio

Rodney with Sarra and Maggie on Lake Michigan
Rodney Mauricio is a Professor in the Department of Genetics at the University of Georgia. Rodney has been recognized for his teaching and mentorship: he won a University-wide teaching award, the Richard B. Russell Teaching Award, as well as the Franklin College's "Excellence in Teaching Award." Undergraduates selected him as the 2003 "Outstanding Academic Adviser" in the Franklin College and he was recognized with the 2006 "Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentoring" Award. He was elected to the University of Georgia's Teaching Academy in 2006. In 2011, he was the inaugural recipient of the Provost's Outstanding Faculty Service Award for his leadership on the reaccreditation committee that instituted the First-Year Odyssey at the 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 in the Department of Biology 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. In 1995, 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.