Throughout my career, I have been committed to connecting people with the resources they need to succeed. From breeding new varieties of bell peppers and winter squash to conducting a needs assessment to establish breeding priorities for Northeast organic vegetable growers, from event planning and facilitation to producing a podcast for would-be plant breeders, I focus on listening and supporting where I can.
Plant Breeding
Through my graduate work at Cornell, I demonstrated my commitment to connecting farmers with the information and resources they need to thrive. One example of this is the Northern Organic Vegetable Improvement Collaborative (NOVIC), a project under which I worked closely with farmers in upstate New York as the coordinator for on-farm trials of existing and under-development vegetable varieties to evaluate their appropriateness for organic production. I was in close contact with our partner growers throughout the season, from communicating the aims and expectations of the project in the late winter, to driving seedlings to the farms in the spring, to monthly farm visits throughout the summer, and finally an in-person season wrap-up to solicit feedback on how the trial varieties had performed.
In addition to the NOVIC on-farm trials, I co-led plant breeding workshops aimed at empowering farmers to develop new vegetable varieties that suit their market and production needs.
Event planning & facilitation
I also have extensive experience engaging diverse stakeholders in the process of organizing and facilitating events, both in the role of lead coordinator and as a member of a planning team. During my time as a consultant at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, I was responsible for coordinating and facilitating grantee meetings, including several ‘Agricultural Research Connections’ workshops – weeklong meetings meant to help connect agricultural scientists based in sub-Saharan Africa with potential international partners in advance of a call for grant proposals. The highly interactive workshops, held in Nairobi, Kenya, were each attended by sixty scientists from research institutions around the world; through my role as a workshop facilitator, I worked with a diverse team and learned the importance of creating a space where all participants are comfortable speaking up and contributing to the conversation at hand.
This experience served me well when I got to Cornell, as one of my first projects was to conduct a needs assessment survey of organically-certified vegetable growers, followed by planning a meeting of representatives of the Northeast organic vegetable seed community (farmers, seed company representatives, university plant breeders and extension agents) to discuss the survey results. The resulting report details the collaboratively-defined priorities for organic vegetable breeding and is intended to help guide future collective work in the region. The success of this needs assessment, carried out while I conducted my field-based thesis research, demonstrates my ability to skillfully manage multiple projects simultaneously.
Full report: Breeding research and education needs assessment for organic vegetable growers in the Northeast.
Press release: https://seedalliance.org/2016/reports-describe-plant-breeding-priorities-for-organic/
Science Communication
I’ve worked in a variety of media to tell the stories of farmers and breeders to highlight their important work.
Free the Seed! podcast
I am the creator, producer and host of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast. This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat - farmers, gardeners, and food-curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it.
Needs Assessment
“We’re Listening.” BoomTown Table
Educational videos
Managing Striped Cucumber Beetles on Organic Farms (21k views to date).
Managing Cucurbit Downy Mildew on Organic Farms (5.8k views to date).