N.J. Inventors Hall of Fame Honors Four Rutgers Faculty Members

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – The New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame honored 20 individuals at its Oct. 18 annual awards dinner, including four Rutgers faculty members. Elwin Orton, professor emeritus of plant biology and pathology, was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Paula Tallal, Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of Neuroscience, received the “Inventor of the Year” award. Marco Gruteser, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Richard Martin, associate professor of computer science, received the Innovators Award.

Tallal has helped to bring positive change to more than three million children and adults who struggle with language and literacy. Fast ForWord®, a revolutionary technique and series of software programs she co-developed, assists people in more than 40 countries by establishing and strengthening the neural networks for language development. Learn more here.

Gruteser and Martin have designed and tested a smart phone application that senses where in a car a cell phone user is sitting: on the driver’s side or the passenger’s side. If the user is on the driver’s side, the app takes several actions that reduce distractions to the driver, such as silently forwarding incoming calls and texts to message boxes for later retrieval. Learn more here.

Orton has been credited with “saving the U.S. dogwood industry” with new strains of hardy, disease- and pest-resistant hybrid dogwoods when diseases and insects threatened the native species of the popular flowering tree. He has earned more than 15 patents, with more pending, for new strains of dogwoods and holly that he developed over his four-decade career. The university estimates that the retail value of his creations is greater than $200 million and licensing royalty proceeds to Rutgers exceed $1.9 million.

“Elwin Orton not only has created living things of great beauty that are enjoyed by people around the world, but his creative work also has produced lucrative patents and valuable new hybrids of dogwoods and holly,” said Kenneth J. Breslauer, Vice President for Health Sciences and Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, who heads research at Rutgers. “Professor Orton's exemplary dedication to science and education is one of the many reasons why the citizens of New Jersey treasure Rutgers as a unique statewide resource that also enables discovery and learning which has a global reach.”

Orton has received many awards over the years, including two major awards from the American Horticultural Society and the Distinguished Service Medal from the Garden Club of America. Orton was inducted into the New Jersey Nursery and Landscape Association’s Hall of Fame and received the Norman J. Coleman Award of the American Association of Nurserymen. And just last week the Eastern Region of the International Plant Propagator's Association initiated a new Research Fund in honor of Orton.

“These awards cover all of my work so it makes me feel confident for once in my life that my career as a plant biologist was successful and I did make an impact in woody ornamentals,” Orton said. “So I am very, very pleased. It gives me great pleasure knowing that millions of people are enjoying my new dogwoods.”

What’s the key to Orton’s success? “It’s imagination,” according to Robert M. Goodman, executive dean of Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and executive director of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station. “What the plant breeder is after doesn’t exist, except in his mind’s eye,” Goodman said in a January 2010 Star-Ledger article. “A lot of it is art and a lot is instinct. It takes patience and perseverance and an intimate knowledge of the plant material. You get out in the field and you don’t give up.”

The current issue of American Gardener, the American Horticultural Society’s magazine, has an admiring profile of Orton, with numerous photos of some dogwood and holly hybrids he created.

A “legendary plant breeder,” is how he’s described.

A resident of Millstone, N.J., Orton earned a bachelor’s in horticulture from Penn State in 1952 and a master’s in horticulture from Ohio State in 1954. Shortly after earning a doctorate in plant genetics from the University of Wisconsin in 1960, Orton joined Rutgers. He was promoted to professor in 1973 and became a Professor Emeritus in 2008.