Alumni

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A L U M N I

Troxler, Collins honored as CALS Distinguished Alumni at Alumni Awards event

Persistent rains and looming off-coast Hurricane Joaquin didn’t deter more than 160 guests from coming to celebrate the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ annual Alumni Awards event Oct. 2. The reception and ceremony took place at the NC State University Club, as Dr. Wanda Collins and North Carolina Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler were named the college’s 2015-2016 Distinguished Alumni. Also receiving awards on this Friday night before CALS Tailgate and Ag Day weekend were 12 Outstanding Alumni and seven Outstanding Young Alumni.

Dean Richard Linton presided over the awards presentations, assisted by George Simpson, president of the CALS Alumni and Friends Society.

“The alumni here tonight represent the fulfi llment of the promise of our land-grant mission in academics, research and extension,” Linton said. “Their professional achievements and service to NC State and their communities exemplify the extraordinary possibility of achievement to our current students, who are our future alumni and leaders. Thank you all for your commitment to excellence.”

The CALS Distinguished Alumnus Award, established in 1974, annually honors individuals who have made a commitment to service and outstanding contributions in their respective careers. Chosen by the college’s administration, the awards honor excellence in implementing progressive state, national and/or international programs; development of improved technology or science; or other outstanding achievements in the fi eld of agriculture and life sciences.

Thus, Collins and Troxler join a select group of top scientists, physicians, business and political leaders, agriculturalists and public servants who have been named CALS Distinguished Alumni.

Collins is an expert in international agricultural research and development. From 2001

until her retirement in 2012, she served as director of the Marc Hall Plant Sciences Institute, Agricultural Research Service, USDA, Beltsville, Maryland, and was acting director of the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center from September to December 2012. She earned her 1974 master’s and 1976 Ph.D. degrees from Dr. Wanda Collins and N.C. Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler NC State in plant pathology and genetics. In 1976 she became a also surprised her with a video he had taken CALS assistant professor of horticultural sciduring on his recent trip abroad. It featured ence and advanced through the ranks to full congratulations from some of Collins’ colprofessor. leagues in Africa, including CALS’ Dr. Craig

In 1995, Collins joined Environmentally Yencho and Dr. Robert Mwanga, one of her Sustainable Development/Agricultural Reformer students, who are involved in sweet search and Extension at the World Bank to potato research in Kenya. promote the development of a global agriculTroxler, who holds a 1974 CALS degree tural research system. She joined the Interin conservation, took offi ce as commissioner national Potato Center (CIP) in Lima, Peru, as of the N.C. Department of Agriculture and deputy director general for research in 1997. Consumer Services in 2005. Since then he While at CIP she oversaw a global research has focused on developing new markets for program on potatoes, sweet potatoes and the state’s farm products, preserving working Andean root and tuber crops; led the Global farms and protecting the state’s food supply. Initiative on Potato Late Blight Disease and He was raised in the Guilford County comwas instrumental in developing CIP’s Vitamin munity of Browns Summit. He has spent his A for Africa program, as well as Urban Harentire career in agriculture as founder, owner vest, a global program on urban horticulture. and operator of Troxler Farms, where, over the

She has also consulted and served as a years, the family farm has produced tobacco, technical adviser and scientifi c liaison offi cer wheat, vegetables and soybeans. for USAID, with experience in Latin America, Also active on the national level, Troxler is the Caribbean and Nigeria. She is currently a past president of the National Association chairman of the board of trustees of the Interof State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) national Center for Tropical Agriculture, headand former chairman of NASDA’s Food Reguquartered in Cali, Colombia. Collins resides in lation and Nutrition Committee. Additionally Emerald Isle. he was president of the Southern Association

While presenting Collins her award, Linton of State Departments of Agriculture.

Marc Hall

Front row, from left: Mullen, Clark, Collins, Troxler, Jackson. Middle row: Harrington, King, Easton, Sepanski, S. Smith, Coronel. Back: Morris, R. Smith, Lane, Godwin, K. Jordan, N. Jordan, Armstrong, Barger, Olsen, Hipps.

The commissioner serves on the boards of the N.C. Foundation for Soil and Water Conservation, the Rural Economic Development Center and the N.C. Biotechnology Center. He is a member of various organizations, such as the N.C. Tobacco Research Commission and the Southern United States Trade Association.

Troxler has been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2014 Public Service Award from the N.C. Travel Industry Association. Other recent honors include the 2013 Forest Conservationist of the Year Award from

Amentor once told Gabe Gusmini, “You and I have the same problem: We see something broken, we’ve got to fi x it.” And fi x things, Gusmini does.

A plant breeder by training, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences alumnus is a junior executive and research-and-development director with PepsiCo, a multinational corporation responsible for such brands as Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Quaker Oats and Tropicana.

Working in the Agro Discovery and Sustainability Research unit, based in St. Paul, Minn., he focuses on solving agricultural challenges and on building stronger teams to accomplish that work.

The team addresses production problems faced by farmers growing PepsiCo’s ingredients the N.C. Wildlife Federation, the Meritorious Service Award from the N.C. Soybean Producers Association, the Elliot O. Grosvenor Food Safety Award from the Association of Food and Drug Offi cials, the Distinguished Service Award from the N.C. Agricultural Foundation and a leadership award from the Western North Carolina Livestock Center and WNC Communities.

Joining Collins and Troxler as event honorees were the college’s Outstanding Alumni and Outstanding Young Alumni for 2015-2016: while striving to improve the crops’ processing abilities and nutritional and fl avor qualities.

“What we are doing is building an organization that works with agriculturally derived raw materials so that we can drive innovation in the fi nished product, based on what comes into the processing plants to begin with,” Gusmini says.

Gusmini’s research unit often works with external partners with unique research capabilities, he says. Through a master agreement with NC State, for example, PepsiCo funds more than $1 million of CALS research in the departments of Crop Science, Horticultural Science and Food, Bioprocessing and Nutrition Sciences.

A key project involves noted plant breeder Dr. Todd Wehner, who taught Gusmini as he

Outstanding Alumni

(with degree years and departments)

Gwen Clark, 1986, Agricultural and Extension

Education Dr. Barry Goodwin, 1988, Agricultural and

Resource Economics Charles Easton, 1962, Agricultural Institute Richard D. Smith, 1967, Agricultural Institute Dr. Karen Jordan, 1981, Animal Science Norman Jordan, 1978, Animal Science James Hipps, 1973, Biological and Agricultural Engineering Dr. Laura Harrington, 1993, Entomology Dr. Pablo Coronel, 2001, 2005, Food, Bioprocessing and Nutrition Sciences Dr. Richard Olsen, 1998, 2006, Horticultural

Science Dr. Kate Barger, 1998, Poultry Science Dr. Mike Mullen, 1987, Soil Science

Outstanding Young Alumni

Tara King, 2003, Agricultural and Extension

Education Sara Lane, 2001, Agricultural and Resource

Economics Sterling Smith, 2001, Agricultural Institute Dr. Todd Armstrong, 2000, Animal Science Dr. James Morris, 2009, Applied Ecology Tiffany Sepanski, 2006, Food, Bioprocessing and Nutrition Sciences Dr. Brian Jackson, 2002, Horticultural Science

CALS alumnus addresses agricultural challenges from farm to fork as a PepsiCo R&D director

– Terri Leith pursued graduate degrees in plant breeding at NC State in the early 2000s.

Gusmini credits Wehner with preparing him for career success. “Nothing in my career would have happened if I hadn’t met Dr. Wehner. He not only gave me opportunity, but he also gave me the skills to be effective from day one in my job,” he says.

Out of gratitude, Gusmini strives to give back, serving as an adjunct faculty member at both NC State and the University of Minnesota. He regularly speaks at the universities, meets with students to help them prepare for their careers and serves on their graduate advisory committees.

Working with graduate students is rewarding on two levels, Gusmini says. “First, gradu-

ate students are very innovative. They look at problems in a different way – without pre-fi xed ideas and concepts and so they can really drive disruptive discovery,” he says. Second, helping prepare the next generation of workers helps PepsiCo reach its talent sustainability goals.

Gusmini realized his passion for managing corporate research-and-development teams through a rapidly-evolving career. Growing up in a suburb of Milan, Italy, he dreamed of having his own farm someday. While attending the University of Milan to earn a bachelor’s degree in agricultural sciences, he joined a group of agronomists with their own consulting fi rm. He also launched a few small agricultural and environmental ventures with others.

In 2001 he came to North Carolina following his life partner, then a post-doc scientist in genetics. Interested in pursuing a graduate degree from NC State, he went door to door around campus looking for opportunities.

In his fi rst conversation with Wehner, the professor asked if he liked plant breeding: “I said, ‘You know, I only failed one class, and that was plant breeding. But it’s science, and I kind of like the subject,’” he recalls. Wehner then asked if he liked watermelon. “I said, ‘I like it as a plant, but I can’t eat it because it bothers me.’”

Still, Wehner offered him a watermelon breeding assistantship, and Gusmini accepted. In 2005, he graduated with a Ph.D. He’d studied watermelon’s resistance to gummy stem blight, a disease caused by Didymella bryoniae, and he’d found genes related to fl esh and rind color, yield and other important watermelon characteristics.

After graduation, he went to work in Naples, Fla., with Syngenta, a global agribusiness company. While he was responsible for breeding zucchini and summer squash varieties for the United States and Mexico, he and a colleague in France began to see value in globalizing breeding programs “to leverage more germplasm and avoid genetic and resource redundancies between programs,” he says.

“The company liked a lot what we were doing. It was a new approach in the vegetable division, and so they gave both of us the opportunity to advance careers. In my case, I was offered the worldwide leadership role for breeding sweet corn, garden beans, and peas, and that’s what brought me to Minnesota,” he says.

The next fi ve years took Gusmini around the world as he continued his efforts to globalize breeding programs and fastBecky Kirkland track them into the genomic era. During these years, he developed a penchant for managing teams and helping them adapt to change.

“I build organizations, I catalyze the shift to new R&D approaches, I emDr. Gabe Gusmini (left) represents PepsiCo in a research project partpower and develop nership with CALS Dr. Todd Wehner, who taught Gusmini at NC State. people to take over, then I move on and go to making a breakthrough contribution that leads do something else,” he says. to a well-fed, healthy population worldwide.

After Syngenta Gusmini joined a former “I haven’t set aside the idea of owning a farm boss at PepsiCo to help him build the new one day – I may do that,” he says. “But right Agro Discovery and Sustainability Research now, I’m driven mostly by my desire to make unit. “That was August 2013, and I’ve been a bigger impact on global food security and there ever since,” Gusmini says. quality in a shorter period of time than done

He sees himself continuing to work toward before.” – Dee Shore

CALS’ Sam Pardue to become UGA dean

Dr. Sam Pardue, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences alumnus and associate dean and director of academic programs, has been named dean of the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

Pardue’s appointment is effective March 14. Dr. John Dole, currently head of the CALS Department of Horticultural Science, will succeed Pardue as CALS associate dean on an interim basis.

Pardue holds a bachelor’s degree in poultry science and a master’s and doctorate in physiology, all from NC State.

“I came to NC State in August of 1973 as an 18-year-old freshman from a small town in the foothills of North Carolina. Since that time I have spent all but eight years affi liated with the university as a student, faculty member and administrator,” Pardue said. “Like so many of my fellow alums, NC State profoundly infl uenced my life. It provided enumerable opportunities and helped shaped who I am. It is, and forever will be, a special place.”

During his time at NC State, Pardue received national teaching and student recruitment awards, was granted three patents, received more than $2.5 million in external grants and contracts, and published nearly 100 journal articles, book chapter and abstracts.

He also facilitated donations in excess of $13 million Sam Pardue for academic programs, helped double the number of poultry science majors, expanded distance education offerings and served as the co-principal investigator on a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to increase the multicultural diversity of agriculture students.

Dean of NC State’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Richard Linton shared, “Sam has done an exceptional job leading our academic programs offi ce, and I am thankful for his leadership and passion for NC State. … We have already discussed potential ways for UGA and CALS to work together in the future, and I look forward to exploring increasing the partnership between these universities.” – Janine Brumfi eld

Bertone helps solve insect mysteries

You could call Dr. Matt Bertone a pest detective. If a farmer needs to know what kind of unusual caterpillars are munching on his corn crops, if a gardener wants to know what’s taking out her tomatoes or if a doctor wonders whether the spider that bit a patient was a dreaded brown recluse, Bertone is there to help.

Bertone is an entomologist with NC State University’s Plant Disease and Insect Clinic. Each year thousands of North Carolinians turn to the clinic, mainly to fi nd out what’s damaging their crops or gardens, and it’s his job to handle the cases involving insects and related creatures. Getting the proper pest identifi cation, he says, is the key fi rst step to helping clients fi gure out how best to control the damage.

Bertone has been building his encyclopedic knowledge of insects and arthropods since he was just 5 years old. As a child, he says, he was too busy drawing pictures of scorpions, reading books about insects and looking at puddle water under microscopes to care much about what other kids considered cool. And for as long as he can remember, he wanted to be an entomologist.

“That’s part of the reason why I love my job. To be good at it, you have to have broad experience,” he says. “And I’ve been looking at insects basically my whole life.”

Born in New York and raised in Pennsylvania, Bertone earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Salisbury University in Maryland. Wanting to specialize in entomology, he ended up at NC State for graduate studies.

With Dr. Wes Watson, now interim head of CALS’ Department of Entomology, Bertone collected and counted almost 90,000 dung beetles to determine which times of the year each of the 30 species he encountered were present in cattle pastures.

Then, with Dr. Brian Weigmann, a William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of entomology, Bertone looked at the genetic and evolutionary relationships among the most primitive fl ies – creatures such as the crane fl y and the mosquito, which have been around for some 250 million years. The Ph.D. work was part of a National Science Foundation-funded project to map the entire evolutionary tree of life for Diptera, an order of more than 150,000 species.

From there, Bertone took a post-doctoral

Becky Kirkland

Dr. Matt Bertone (above), at work in the Plant Disease and Insect Clinic, is also an accomplished photographer. Below, his shot of a crab spider.

Matt Bertone

research position that called for him to learn more about wasps, then another in which he looked at every arthropod he could fi nd in 50 local homes. Through the latter project, he ended up identifying more than 10,000 insect specimens, including what he calls “bits and pieces” of dead arthropods.

Bertone says that having such diverse experiences positioned him well for the job he’s held in the Plant Disease and Insect Clinic for the past two and a half years.

Whether he’s answering questions “for clients with commercial operations needing good answers to keep their businesses afl oat or for homeowners who fi nd something weird and interesting in their homes,” he says, Bertone is happy to help.

Bertone also frequently helps out students or other scientists who need insect IDs. “For their research, they want the best identifi cations possible, so they’ll bring specimens to me, and in maybe 10 seconds I can usually tell them what it might take them hours to determine,” he says.

In addition to identifying arthropods, Bertone serves as a guest lecturer in CALS classes and presents an every-other-month webinar for Master Gardeners and Cooperative Extension agents. He also frequently speaks at workshops and other events. For example, last fall he led a workshop in Washington, D.C., to teach public garden employees to identify pests. And he delivered a presentation titled “The Most Interesting Critters You’ve Never Heard Of” at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences’ annual BugFest.

In the winters, when work in the clinic typically slows down, Bertone devotes some time to curating specimens, both ones he collected and ones that are part of NC State’s Insect Museum. He also publishes fact sheets and scientifi c papers, such as one he co-wrote in 2014 in the journal Clinical Pediatrics about the fi rst two reported cases of brown recluse spider bites in North Carolina.

Although those spider bites were nearly fatal, Bertone is quick to calm fears that recluses are spreading. “Brown recluse spiders have a bad rap. They are probably the most feared spiders, but they are also among the ones least likely to be encountered here,” he says. In North Carolina, they are native to only the western tip of the state, and they are, as their name implies, secretive and not aggressive.

Getting to dispel misconceptions about spiders and insects is one of the most compelling aspects of Bertone’s job. And so, he says, is the variety.

“Every day is different,” he says. “One day someone might want to know how to preserve butterfl ies for collections, and another day I might be asked where insects that were found in industrial shipping containers came from.”

As if his job didn’t bring him face-to-face with enough insects, Bertone spends a good bit of his free time creating striking, super-close-up photos of some of the most interesting subjects, which for Bertone means most all of them.

“All of these insects and critters are really important to people’s lives, whether they are agricultural or medical pests – or even if they are doing benefi cial things like returning nutrition to the soil,” Bertone says. “It’s great to be able to answer people’s questions and help them fi nd ways to manage the ones that are pests. It’s a perfect job.” – Dee Shore