The college is honored to congratulate CALS faculty promoted to associate professor with tenure or full professor during fiscal year 2023 (July 2022-June 2023).

Promoted to associate professor:

• Jing Fan, Department of Nutritional Sciences
• Rodrigo Werle, Department of Plant and Agroecosystem Sciences
• Ophelia Venturelli, Department of Biochemistry
• Karthik Anantharaman, Department of Bacteriology
• Yi Wang, Department of Plant and Agroecosystem Sciences

Promoted to full professor:

• Aaron Hoskins, Department of Biochemistry
• Erin Silva, Department of Plant Pathology
• Bret Shaw, Department of Life Sciences Communication
• Garret Suen, Department of Bacteriology

“The most recent round of promotions to associate professor and professor showcases some of the extraordinary faculty talents in CALS,” says Irwin Goldman, interim associate dean for faculty affairs. “The scholarly contributions of these faculty include human and field-scale efforts to improve health communications for terminally ill patients, development of agroecologically and environmentally-based solutions to sustainable weed management in crop agriculture, and development of machine learning and remote sensing tools for more accurate prediction of crop quality and health.

“At the molecular level, faculty have uncovered new details on how RNA is built, processed, and degraded, and deployed the tools of synthetic biology to understand molecular principles of microbial communities. An example of this work involves understanding how microbes turn plant biomass into nutrients that are important for many forms of life. CALS faculty have pioneered studies on how the environment impacts mammalian cellular metabolism, and how microbial ecology can be merged with data science to better understand human and ecosystem health.

“Taken together, the work of these recently promoted faculty highlights the tremendous breadth and depth of faculty work in our college, and demonstrates why our unique combination of agriculture and life sciences can be such a powerful scientific engine for discovery.”