June 9 (UPI) -- A group of researchers named a new species of alga after Amanda Gorman, the poet for President Joe Biden's inauguration in 2021.
The researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute discovered the green alga -- Gormaniella terricola -- from central New York in 2020 and were experiencing a "dark time" amid a year of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol as they sought to come up with the name, researcher Fay-Wei Li said in a press release.
Li, an adjunct assistant professor at the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University, said the group then found inspiration when Gorman, delivered her poem, "The Hill We Climb" during Biden's inauguration on Jan. 20, ultimately deciding to name the genus after her.
"At a point when it was sometimes difficult to find meaning in our research, Amanda Gorman gifted us with this incredibly uplifting poem that gave us a renewed sense of hope in the lab," he said.
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