Pamela Carvalho-Moore, a Ph.D. student in the Crop, Soil and Environmental Sciences Department, is one of 110 doctoral students in the U. S. and Canada selected to receive a $20,000 Scholar Award from the P.E.O. Sisterhood. She was sponsored by Chapter AG of Harrison, Arkansas.

Carvalho-Moore, a native of Rondônia in Brazil, is a 2018 Universidade Federal do Pampa graduate where she majored in agronomy. She earned her M.S. in 2018 in cell and molecular biology from the U of A. Carvalho-Moore is a Doctoral Academy Fellow under the advisement of Dr. Jason Norsworthy, and her research focuses on the addition of metabolic inhibitors as an approach to improve the efficacy of the herbicide glufosinate under varied environmental scenarios, as well as understanding the resistance mechanism to glufosinate in resistant Palmer amaranth from Arkansas. At the end of her first year in graduate school, Carvalho-Moore published a paper with the first report worldwide of an increase in chloroplastic glutamine synthetase amplification (the enzyme targeted by glufosinate) in a glufosinate-resistant species. This paper was published in the peer-reviewed journal Weed Science in early June 2022.

"It is an honor to be awarded this highly competitive and prestigious award. I thank Chapter AG and Robin Seymore for believing in and supporting my application. Robin was extremely helpful and walked me through the whole application process," Carvalho-Moore said. "The P.E.O. Scholar Award will allow me to participate in workshops and training that will be applied to my research."

The P.E.O. Scholar Awards were established in 1991 to provide substantial merit-based awards for women of the United States and Canada who are pursuing a doctoral-level degree at an accredited college or university. Scholar Awards recipients are a select group of women chosen for their high level of academic achievement and their potential for having a positive impact on society.

The P.E.O. Sisterhood, founded January 21, 1869, at Iowa Wesleyan College, Mount Pleasant, Iowa, is a philanthropic educational organization dedicated to supporting higher education for women. There are approximately 6,000 local chapters in the United States and Canada, with nearly a quarter of a million active members.