Earlier this year, eight new faculty members joined the ranks in the West Virginia University Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design. They bring diverse educational and research backgrounds that will help propel the College forward. Join us in welcoming:
- Caroline Arantes
- Alex P. Byrd
- Aaron Giorgi
- Brent Murry
- Sunidhi Mehta
- Ibukun Ogunade
- Carlos Quesada
- Elizabeth Rowen
We were able to catch up with several of them when they first arrived at WVU.
Caroline (Carol) Arantes
Carol Arantes, assistant professor of wildlife and fisheries resources, believes
scientific information should be used to solve societal problems related to the
environment.
Dedicated to understanding how fish and fisheries respond to global changing processes, she’s spent the last 17 years conducting research in various parts of the Amazon.
After earning her bachelor’s in oceanography from the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro in 2003, Arantes joined a large natural resources management program in Tete, Amazonas, Brazil, working with local communities and fishermen to help assess fish populations and make management decisions.
“One of the major duties I had was to develop a management system for arapaima,” she said. “Arapaima is one of the largest freshwater fish in the world. It is an extremely important fish for the local community since it can grow very large.”
Since the fish were over-harvested, Arantes helped the fishermen develop a counting method to assess the populations during breeding while the fish were easily visible on the water’s surface.
“This was really important culturally and economically; it was a benchmark in the development of management in the Amazon,” she said. “The fish population recovered after the system was implemented; the fishermen’s participation increased, and their income increased, so this system is spreading across the Amazon.”
In 2009, after earning her master’s in applied zoology from the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, Arantes worked as a research scientist for the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, expanding her research program to include land cover changes and hydraulic deep alteration.
As a doctoral student at Texas A&M University and then a research associate at Michigan State University, she’s been working to understand how deforestation is impacting fish assemblages, fisheries and food webs in large rivers, and also how hydrology alteration and loss of connectivity is affecting the same aspects.
An urge to establish and expand her laboratory, work with diverse faculty and the geographic location of Morgantown drew Arantes to WVU.
“This area is fantastic; the Appalachian Mountains and the university scene are really
nice,” she said. “I realized there was a diverse body of faculty that collaborate
a lot among themselves. The more I searched for resources and understanding about
the division and the university, I decided that this is an ideal job.”
Aaron Giorgi
When asked how he made his way to WVU, Aaron Giorgi quipped, “Through lots of football
conferences and rivalries”
The Miami native earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agricultural education from the University of Florida, his doctorate in agricultural communication from The Ohio State University and, now, he’s an assistant professor of agricultural and extension education at WVU.
If you’re keeping track, that’s four athletic conferences: ACC, SEC, Big 10 and Big 12.
“As a person who, again, grew up in Miami and watched the 2002 national championship game [University of Miami vs. Ohio State University], it was funny that I ended up at Ohio State and my friends also heckle me for that,” he said.
While he’ll always remain loyal to (and cheer for) his alma maters, he’s is excited to join the Mountaineer family.
Giorgi happened to fall into the field of agriculture as a student at Coral Reef High School, a magnet school that offers six different educational programs and assigns students to them based on interests.
“That’s a really funny anecdotal story. I actually thought I was signing up for engineering, but I didn’t sign up correctly. When they called to ask me questions, I wasn’t listening and said, ‘Yeah, that one that said ag,” he laughed.
Although the classes weren’t initially what he expected, Giorgi fell in love with the diverse possibilities in agriculture.
“I was never raised on a farm; I don’t have roots to the true production agrarian perspective, but I fell in love with the diversity of opportunities and the intersectionality of opportunities in the agriculture industry,” he said. “Nowhere else can you walk into a room of individuals who all can rightfully claim agriculture as their bread and butter profession and find a bench scientist, a GIS statistician, a soil scientist, a tree farmer and my father-in-law, a hobby farmer electrician.”
After graduating from the University of Florida, Giorgi worked as an agricultural biotechnology teacher in Tampa where he assisted in curriculum and assessment development for implementation of a statewide agricultural biotechnology program.
He then transitioned into a school improvement specialist role focusing on career and technical education with the Florida Department of Education.
At WVU, Giorgi teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in agricultural and extension
education.
Elizabeth Rowen
Growing up, Elizabeth Rowen always dreamed of being an astronaut.
“When I realized the food was not so good in space, I decided instead I would help develop crops for NASA,” she said.
And so began her journey to a career in the field of agriculture.
The Santa Cruz, California, native moved across the United States to attend Wellesley College in Massachusetts. As a biology major, Rowen developed a keen interest in plant ecology and agroecology.
“I applied to do an internship with the Bureau of Land Management through the Chicago Botanic Gardens and was placed back in California to collect native seeds for restoration projects,” she said. “While I was doing that, I realized I really love collecting data and trying to understand what’s happening in the field rather than just being outside.”
Interested in expanding her knowledge of plant behavior and ecology, Rowen enrolled at Purdue University as a master’s student in entomology.
Her research focused on better understanding how plants, specifically tomatoes, release volatile odors to communicate about the insects attacking them.
“I was actually terrified of insects before starting my master’s. They were not my thing, but the more I have studied them and worked with them, the more excited I am,” she said.
With the entomology side growing on her – and a love of conducting research – Rowen went on to pursue a doctorate in entomology at Penn State University where her research focused on the effects of soil management techniques on corn and soybean resistance to herbivores and their predators.
With a focus on field crops as well as sustainable soil management and how it affects
insects, she hopes to translate that research into cover crops, food safety and
pest management while at WVU.
Sunidhi Mehta
A textile scientist, Sunidhi Mehta brings a different perspective to the Davis College’s
Fashion, Dress and Merchandising program.
“When I say textiles people usually assume I’m a fashion designer, but textile scientists are very different from designers,” she said. “We don’t do the creative work; we work with the functional aspects of textiles. For example, the clothing we wear is very different from the clothing that astronauts wear on a mission because it has to have a certain function; it has to have certain properties. Textile scientists change or modify the properties of the fabric using nanoscience.”
Originally from India, Mehta earned her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees at Punjab Agricultural University which is set up similarly to land grant universities in the United States.
There, she developed chemically protective textiles to be used as personal protective equipment for pesticide workers.
“There’s a huge issue in India with pesticide exposure,” she explained. “Pesticides are carcinogenic and cause a lot of genetic problems and birth defects, so I felt the need to find a solution.”
Using nano chemistry, Mehta turned normal fabric into a fabric that is water and oil repellent.
“It basically acts like plastic, but it breathes like 100% cotton,” she said.
Mehta went on to design two sets of head-to-toe protective suits and the designs are currently being promoted by the extension department at her former university.
After earning her doctorate, she moved to the United States in 2010 to pursue a master’s degree at Central Michigan University.
Although the path may seem unusual, Mehta was interested in learning specific technologies available in the university’s state-of-the-art merchandising and design technology lab including Thermal Manikin, Sweating Guarded HotPlate, biofeedback system, FLIR thermal imaging system, 3D body scanner, walk-in environmental chamber, and Scanning Electron Microscopy.
As part of master’s thesis, she created aromatherapeutic textiles to help reduce stress.
“It’s very hard to contain aroma; it’s very volatile,” she said. “We created this encapsulation and then embedded the capsules on the surface of fabric. You can’t see it, but the fabrics smelled of lavender or cedarwood and it was supposed to help relieve mental stress.”
Although previous research exists on aromatherapeutic textiles, Mehta’s study was groundbreaking in that there was no information on the effectiveness of the textiles.
“I used a biofeedback system to test the performance of the textiles. It measures your heart rate, respiration rate, skin temperature and skin conductance. All of those are markers of stress,” she explained. “Nobody had ever measured stress at the time of my study.”
Mehta said she’s looking forward to advancing the topic and doing more research in that area while at WVU.