BGU professor wins aquaculture award

It was presented to him at the GAA’s GOAL conference in Paris on Tuesday.

By DANIELLE ZIRI
Ben-Gurion University campus in Beersheba 370 (photo credit: BGU)
Ben-Gurion University campus in Beersheba 370
(photo credit: BGU)
Prof. Amir Sagi of the Ben- Gurion University of the Negev has won the Global Aquaculture Alliance’s inaugural innovation award.
It was presented to him at the GAA’s GOAL conference in Paris on Tuesday.
Sagi’s innovation – a novel biotechnology application to produce an all-male population of the giant freshwater prawn Macrobrachium rosenbergii through temporal RNA interference – was chosen among 15 applications from 10 countries – Australia, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Ecuador, India, Peru, Korea, Taiwan and the United States.
The award, sponsored by the international animal nutrition solutions company Novus, was accompanied by a $1,000 cash prize.
Sagi is the former president of the International Society of Invertebrate Reproduction and Development and former dean of the faculty of Natural Sciences at Ben-Gurion University.
He holds the Lily and Sidney Oelbaum chair for Applied Biochemistry at the Department of Life Sciences and the National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev. He presented his innovation to about 350 attendees at GOAL 2013 on Tuesday.