Alumni & Development
About the Alfred Parson Mower Award
Department of Biology alumna, Tracy Lawhon Parrott, earned a B.S. in Microbiology from IU in 1988 and a JD from IUPUI in 1994. With more than 20 years experience in the life science industry, Parrott left her work with large pharmaceutical firms to join a seed-stage biotech company in California, where she is Chief Pharmaceutical Development Officer for Tragara Pharmaceuticals. Read an article about Parrott and her grandfather, Alfred Parson Mower, written a year before her marriage, that appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of “The Biology Alumni Newsletter.”
Alfred Parson Mower Scholarship
Rebecca Rice, 2011 First Mower Award Recipient
 Rebecca Rice (in blue) with donor Tracy Lawhon and her research mentors grad student Jonathan Atwell and Dr. Ellen Ketterson. (Photo: Kathy Wyss) |
Rebecca Rice is a junior majoring in Biology and Geology with minors in Animal Behavior, Mathematics, and Japanese. She is a member of the Hutton Honors College, a Cox Research Scholar, an IU-STARS Scholar, and was an IFLE Program participant. Becky joined Dr. Ellen Ketterson’s avian biology laboratory during the summer after high school. Since then she has researched the adaptability of songbird species to urban environments. Becky has received two NSF-funded summer internships to conduct evolutionary ecology research at Virginia’s Mountain Lake Biological Station, working with juncos, and Florida’s Archbold Biological Research Station, where she did insect population monitoring and plant fitness measurements involving yucca moths and the plant Yucca filamentosa. Her Honors Thesis will be done in Dr. Armin Moczek’s behavioral ecology lab, where she will research evolutionary constraints due to thermoregulatory requirements in beetles.
Read about the Mower Scholarship requirements for undergraduate students »