COVID-19 Forces a Change in Plans for Researchers Studying Global Photosynthesis
Drs. Laura Meredith and Jana U’Ren pivoted from their scheduled field work trip to Alaska to infer the impact of terrestrial carbon loss on climate change.
Drs. Laura Meredith and Jana U’Ren pivoted from their scheduled field work trip to Alaska to infer the impact of terrestrial carbon loss on climate change.
In early January, Drs. Laura Meredith and Jana U’Ren were planning a summer trip to Alaska to collect field samples for their newly funded climate change study – but as COVID-19 rapidly spread across the globe, the team quickly realized they needed to pivot from their original plans.
A summer internship at Bayer's Marana Greenhouse reaffirmed Caroline Schulte's passion to put her recent Biosystems Engineering degree to work to sustainably feed the world's growing population.
In a traditional outdoor farm system, corn can be pollinated once a day, typically in the morning. But Bayer’s Marana Greenhouse is not a traditional system, and their team is looking to change what ‘typical’ pollination looks like.
Throughout the novel coronavirus pandemic, faculty within the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences have banded together to serve our local communities—from producing much-needed hand sanitizer for area healthcare workers to most recently donating 900 hundred pounds of fresh produce to Northern Arizona’s Navajo Nation.
A biosystems engineering student is succeeding with scholarship support from CALS, Biosystems Engineering.
Mark Jendrisak ’19 started to gravitate toward a career in waste or wastewater management while he was earning his bachelor’s degree.
“When I chose engineering, I realized we could integrate a solution into reducing or reusing wastes,” he says.
Jendrisak also began to think graduate school could be attainable. He applied for scholarships, obtained two jobs, and sought academic and career advice from advisers, instructors and fellow students. He set a goal to finish his master’s degree in biosystems engineering without accruing debt.
Many things change for astronauts when they leave Earth and head into space, but at least one remains the same: They need food and water. NASA recently awarded funding to two University of Arizona teams to search for water and grow food in space.
Led by researchers in the College of Engineering and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the missions focus on harvesting water from the lunar surface and improving techniques for microgravity crop production.
Growing Crops in Space
NASA funding will support UArizona teams working on ways to harvest water and produce crops in space.
In the race against global climate change, researchers at the University of Arizona are working to preserve, catalog, and map the potential of thousands of species of imperiled fungi found in the world’s boreal forests.