College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences Awards

Agriculture and Water at USU Research Landscapes

Associate Professor Matt Yost was invited to present his work on optimizing water use in agriculture at 2022 USU Research Landscapes, a series that connects state and community decision-makers with work going on at USU to address some of Utah’s most critical issues.

Irrigation accounts for more than 70% of water use in Utah, and farms provide both food and jobs and contribute to the state’s economy. But there are ways to use water more efficiently. Yost discussed research and field trials with recent advances in irrigation systems, drought-tolerant crops, and soil management.

See his presentation online at research.usu.edu/landscapes

Utah State University’s Top Doctoral Student Researcher

Food science Ph.D. student David Dang was named USU’s 2022 Doctoral Student Researcher of the Year. While pursuing his doctoral degree, Dang presented his food and meat science research at national conferences, was part of winning product development teams in the Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food Sciences, and was a teaching assistant in three upper-division and graduate-level courses. Dang’s research resulted in six research publications, and he was an outstanding mentor to many undergrad and graduate students.

Leading the Way in Ag Ed

Professor Rebecca Lawver, head of the Department of Applied Sciences, Technology and Education, was elected president of the American Association for Agricultural Education. Lawver was also named a fellow of the association, an honor given to just four members of the association each year in recognition of exceptional contributions to the profession and the organization. Lawver is a self-described “city kid” who discovered her love for agricultural education when she was in college. She is proud to apply her knowledge and belief in the profession’s importance to preparing future high school agriculture teachers whose skills are in demand across the country.

Isaac and the Chocolate Factory

There’s a lot more involved in making chocolate bars than most people realize, and students from Butler Middle School in the Salt Lake City area got a hands-on experience with the process at the Aggie Chocolate Factory. It might seem an odd field trip for students in an English class, but it was a special follow-up to having read Roald Dahl’s beloved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Students were assigned to create a new chocolate-based candy bar, slogan, and marketing label. Students voted for their favorites, and Isaac Ison emerged as the winner with Campfire Crunch — milk chocolate with mini marshmallows and graham cracker bits. The students also learned the process from bean to bar as they made Isaac’s chocolate bar dream come true.

Plants in Space

Doctoral student Chihiro Naruke was awarded first place for her research presented at the American Geophysical Union’s annual conference, which brought together (in-person and virtually) more than 25,000 participants from over 100 countries. Her work on how root growth affects the pore spaces in soil/growth media aims to help design ideal plant growth systems for microgravity conditions. Faculty mentor Professor Scott Jones said the award is more appreciated and remarkable because English is Naruke’s second language. She is now working on a NASA-funded research project and completing her Ph.D.

Top Educators Honored

CAAS faculty members Dave Anderson and Heloisa Rutigliano were recognized as being among the best teachers in the nation by the North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture organization.

Anderson’s introductory course at USU is the highest-attended landscape architecture course in the country. In the 2021-22 academic year, he taught more than 1,000 students. He also oversees the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning’s senior capstone course in planning and design leadership. His teaching interests focus on water-conserving landscapes, regional identity, sustainable design, and environmental education. Students describe him as a “professor and friend who can encourage you to keep going, even on the hardest days.”

Rutigliano teaches veterinary physiology, immunology, endocrinology, and ethics in the College of Veterinary Medicine. During her career at USU, Rutigliano has also been involved in research to identify mechanisms underlying pregnancy loss in livestock species. While she was not initially drawn to teaching at the start of her academic career, Rutigliano was a teaching assistant while earning her graduate degrees and found the work exciting and fulfilling. In addition to her teaching, she is also helping to develop the new college’s curriculum, a task that will ultimately serve hundreds of students and their future patients for decades to come.

Notable Research

Understanding the conditions that combine to create extreme weather events is crucial to being able to predict them. That requires careful analysis of measurable but complex interactions of the atmosphere, land, and water. USU climate scientist Professor Simon Wang coauthored a paper with an international team of scientists that appeared in the prestigious journal Nature Communications examining greater summertime midlatitude waves in the atmosphere and the role of changing sea surface temperatures. The research emphasizes the need to better predict sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific as a tool to project summer weather extremes.

Find the paper online at tinyurl.com/JetStreamWavinessNature

Professor Zhongde Wang and scientists in his lab were recently part of a COVID-related study published in Nature. Since 2020, Wang and his colleagues have been involved in more than 10 studies related to SARS-CoV-2 and its variants that have been published in top-tier scientific journals. Understanding how any virus infects and affects cells is a crucial step in developing treatments. Using genome engineering tools such as CRISPR/ Cas9, Wang’s lab was the first in the world to produce golden Syrian hamsters that react to disease challenges in ways that are more like humans. Studies with these hamsters require fewer animals and produce clearer findings that help in developing disease treatment and prevention.

Five mammarenaviruses in the western hemisphere cause lifethreatening diseases that affect many organs in the body and often cause severe bleeding.

These hemorrhagic fever viruses are the focus of much of the work done by virologist Brian Gowen and scientists in his lab. Gowen and collaborators recently demonstrated how a specific antibody may inhibit infection from mammarenaviruses. Their work, published in Nature Communications, provides the basis for developing a new treatment to block infection and treat hemorrhagic fever viruses.