Looking Back: GPSA Founders Recount the Early Years
The Graduate Program and Sustainable Agriculture invites you to join us for:
"Looking Back: GPSA Founders Recount the Early Years"
In celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture, we are inviting four past members of the GPSA program to join us virtually to recount their experiences developing the program. We will gather in Curtiss 0013 to watch the virtual panel. Join us in person or online for a conversational look back on the early years of GPSA!
Zoom Option: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82866959236
Looking Back: GPSA Founders Recount the Early Years Video (Echo360)
Panelists:
Michael Bell (he, him, his) is Chair and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Community and Environmental Sociology. Mike is also a faculty associate in Environmental Studies, Religious Studies, and Agroecology. He is author or editor of eleven books, three of which have won national awards. His most recent books are City of the Good: Nature, Religion, and the Ancient Search for What Is Right (Princeton, 2018), the Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology (Cambridge, 2020), and the 6th edition of Invitation to Environmental Sociology (Sage, 2021).
Mike’s work focuses on three themes: environmental sociology, agroecology, and community. A central theme that weaves through all (or nearly all!) of his work is the social meaning of nature, and especially its relationship to the social organization of inequality. He has published on the relationship of ideas of nature to inequities of class, race, gender, sexualities, and the rural, tracing their social and political use in debates over environment, religion, heritage, place, agriculture, food, and more.
Mike is currently working on a book about the social experience of heritage, completing the second edition of Farming for Us All: Practical Agriculture and Cultivation of Sustainability (his book about Practical Farmers of Iowa), and serving as a co-PI on the Grassland 2.0 project, a $10 million USDA funded, five-year grant to transform agriculture through perennialization.
In the evenings, Mike is a prolific composer and performer of grassroots and classical music. For more on his work and passions, see his website.
Education: Ph.D., 1992, Yale University
CLARE HINRICHS is a Professor of Rural Sociology at The Pennsylvania State University. She holds a PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University and served as a faculty member in the Sociology Department at Iowa State University from 1997-2004. Her research, teaching and public engagement activities center broadly on the social dynamics of transitions to more sustainable food, agricultural and environmental systems. Her projects have included both discipline-focused inquiries and larger multi-institutional, interdisciplinary collaborative projects, funded by NSF, USDA-NIFA, the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, among others. She served as President of the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society in 2013.
Tom Richard is Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering and Director of Institutes for Energy and the Environment at Penn State. His Bioconversion Research Group applies fundamental engineering science to microbial ecosystems, developing innovative strategies for a more sustainable agriculture and the emerging bio-based economy. Our particular emphasis is on microbial processes that occur in three-phase porous media, where solid, liquid, and gas phases all play critical roles. These porous media systems are referred to variously as:
- solid-state fermentation in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and food processing industries;
- composting in the manure management and solid waste realms,
- ensilage on dairy and beef cattle farms, and
- soils in agroecosystems.
The complexity of these systems lies not only in their immediate physical, chemical, and biological dimensions, but also in the human and natural systems within which they are embedded. Understanding and improving the performance of these microbial processes demands a multi-dimensional perspective and invites interdisciplinary collaboration.
Dr. Richard currently directs the Northeast Regional Sun Grant Center for the USDA, serves on the Agricultural Science Committee of the U.S. EPA's Science Advisory Board and is the deputy technical director for the DOE's National Risk Assessment Partnership for geologic carbon sequestration. Tom is the author or co-author of over 150 research and technical publications, a Fellow of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, and a Fellow and Past President of the Institute of Biological Engineering.
Ricardo Salvador: As the senior scientist and director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, Ricardo Salvador has over four decades of experience working with citizens, scientists, economists, and politicians to transition our current food system into one that grows healthy foods while employing sustainable and socially equitable practices.
Before coming to UCS, Dr. Salvador served as a program officer for food, health, and well-being with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. In this capacity, he was responsible for conceptualizing and managing the Foundation’s food systems programming. He partnered with colleagues to create programs that addressed the connections between food and health, environment, economic development, sovereignty, and social justice.
Prior to that, he was an associate professor of agronomy at Iowa State University. While at ISU, Dr. Salvador taught the first course in sustainable agriculture at a land-grant university, and his graduate students conducted some of the original academic research on community-supported agriculture. He also worked with students to establish ISU's student-operated organic farm, and with other faculty to develop the nation’s first sustainable agriculture graduate program in 2000; Dr. Salvador served as the program’s first chair. Dr. Salvador also worked as an extension agent with Texas A&M University.
Dr. Salvador has been interviewed by the BBC, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, National Public Radio, Democracy Now!, MSNBC, The Boston Globe and many other leading global publications. In addition, he has authored opinion columns for The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, including a 2014 call for a coherent national food policy, which has influenced the thinking of many decision makers in government and the private sector about the imperatives for food and farm policy.
He advises a range of scientific, advocacy and social justice organizations, including the the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, The International Panel of Experts in Sustainable Food, The Land Institute, The Center for Good Food Purchasing, FoodCorps, the HEAL Food Alliance and others.
Dr. Salvador earned a B.S. in agricultural science from New Mexico State University. He holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in crop production and physiology from Iowa State University.