Not only does she need a deep understanding of plant care and cultivation, but she needs to know a thing or two about plumbing and mechanics—enough to keep the facility’s hoses, water filters, fertilizer injectors and other key pieces of equipment up and running. (For big problems she calls UW’s Physical Plant.)

“I’m a Jill-of-all trades,” explains Oosterwyk, who took the manager position in 2007.

Her primary responsibilities are keeping the plants healthy, supervising the greenhouse staff and consulting with UW faculty and staff on greenhouse space availability and scheduling. Oosterwyk also plans and runs a large number of outreach and extension activities to promote the greenhouse as a destination and resource for instruction in plant sciences. And she teaches classes for the Department of Horticulture—including lectures and labs—on greenhouse production, ornamental plants and other topics.

She credits her dedicated crew of student employees for making a great job even better. They help her water plants, host events and give tours.

“They are my extra eyes and ears in the greenhouse, letting me know when something needs attention,” she says.

Wells’s Smock Valley Timber is more than a business—it’s part of his education. He started it as a hands-on project for the National FFA Organization, the youth program focused on agricultural and natural resource careers, while he was still in high school. Wells enjoyed working the wood and growing the business so much that he opted to enroll in CALS as a forest and wildlife ecology major with an eye toward a career in forestry or forest products.

While practicing and studying forestry keeps Wells busy, the program that sent him into the woods in the first place keeps him even busier. Logan is a state vice president in the Wisconsin FFA Association, representing 24 FFA chapters in Dane, Rock and Green counties.

Much of that work involves going out to middle and high schools, where he encourages FFA members to get active in the program and talks with them about the importance of “soft” skills—a positive attitude, good work habits, teamwork and other traits that can put them on the path to success.

His own high school FFA project helps them understand where a good idea and a good attitude can take them. His timber enterprise paid off in more than money. It earned a top prize in a national FFA competition, which in turn earned him a spot on an agricultural exchange trip to Costa Rica featuring visits to banana, coffee and cacao plantations, whitewater rafting and trips through the rainforest on zip lines and suspension bridges—all very exciting stuff for students to hear about.

“I get to tell them my story and inspire them to do something like that for themselves,” Wells says.

This story was first published in the Spring 2013 issue of Grow.

Moyer developed a presentation for the national Grape Community of Practice (GCoP), an Extension network of 87 grape production professionals from 31 states and Ontario, Canada. The GCoP is distributing Moyer’s presentation to its members at universities and government agencies who are involved in training U.S. troops.

With this work Moyer joins a number of experts in the CALS community who are helping the U.S. military improve agriculture in Afghanistan. For example, CALS serves as a training and “reachback” resource for Wisconsin National Guard agribusiness development troops serving in Afghanistan.

1. Why is it important for U.S. troops to know about Afghanistan’s grape cultivation?

Grapes, the leading horticulture crop in Afghanistan, are used predominately for fresh eating and raisin production. Many troops arrive in country during the growing season, so being aware of what they’re seeing will help minimize damage. That’scritical in establishing rapport with local communities. There are many U.S.-based economic development teams working in Afghanistan to help promote agricultural production, so clearly everyone wants to be on the same page. If other U.S. and international aid agencies are promoting the growth and development of the viticulture industry, it is imperative that military efforts do not hinder it.

2. How does grape cultivation in Afghanistan and in the United States differ?

The biggest differences are the extent and level of infrastructure. Afghan vineyards often are not arranged in rows. In many cases, vines are trellised on any available structure or grow in a bush form. Irrigation systems are still predominately in the form of ditches, and we highlight the need to be careful when operating machinery through them as it could negatively impact farmland downstream.

Vineyards growing raisin grapes often have large structures called kishmish khanas located in their center. These are drying houses for raisins. Grapes are dried in a similar fashion as tobacco is in Wisconsin: they’re hung on various levels inside a dark building with sufficient air circulation. As they dry, the raisins drop to the ground, where they are collected. Unfortunately, khanas also are likely spots for insurgent activity, so we highlight being careful when scouting—for many reasons!—as you could damage produce worth thousands of dollars.

3. What did you learn from the experience of preparing a group for this particular need?

It really highlighted the global and cultural significance of grape production. In the United States, we tend to focus on wine grape production when we think of grapes. But grapes have so many more uses that are equally vital and are an integral part of a culture’s heritage. It was fascinating to learn about this type, style and level of grape production, particularly relating to raisin production in Afghanistan. I am impressed that the U.S. military reaches out to Extension for this education. It highlights that the U.S.’s intention in these types of operations is to help, even if that message gets lost in the political and emotional strains of conflict.

This profile was originally published in the Fall 2012 issue of Grow magazine.

Learn more about Weibel's research and microtools in this Q & A:

Why are there still so many major unknowns about bacteria? How can that be?

The issue with bacteria is they are so small. By comparison, eukaryotic cells are enormous! For a calibration point, a human hair is about 100 microns in diameter. That’s about the thickness of a piece of scotch tape. And a eukaryote—when it’s spread on a surface—is maybe 40 microns in diameter. But the bacteria we look at are about one micron long, and their short axis is just several hundred nanometers. Until recently it was very difficult to look at them under a microscope and see anything useful going on inside the cell. Fortunately, there’s been a revolution in optical microscopy techniques over the last five years, and now we can see inside them with pretty good resolution.

How has our understanding about these microorganisms grown in recent years?

Historically, bacteria have always been thought of in the context of the way that we studied them: as individuals. They were always freely suspended in liquid nutrients and were dilute enough so that they never made physical contact with each other. But it’s pretty clear now that many bacteria in the ecosystem exist in tight-knit communities.

And during certain developmental stages, bacterial cells will display collective dynamics, where they are no longer acting as individual cells—as little one-bit processors—but are actually making collective decisions. In these cases, they are communicating and acting more like a multicellular organism—as something a lot more sophisticated than we’ve ever really appreciated.

Tell me more about this collective behavior.

A lot of people know that bacteria swim in solution, but they also swim in groups on surfaces. This collective movement on surfaces is called swarming.

As the bacterial community moves across a surface, the cells mix—and this mixing ensures that all of the cells get nutrients and growth factors to continue replicating. Swarming allows the cells to grow explosively and to colonize whatever niche they’re provided with.

What are you trying to learn about swarming in your lab?

We’re trying to figure out two things. One has to do with behavior: How does the motion of individual cells on a small scale lead to the pattern formation—the continuous mixing—of the swarm on a large scale? The other question is really the biochemistry of how it works. How do cells sense the surface and then change their morphology to interact with it?

This work should tell us some basic rules about how cells sense things outside of themselves—from fluids to surfaces to other cells. I think this is super interesting.

Can you describe one of the microtools you’ve developed to study bacteria?

Sure, but let me give you some more context first. In addition to studying the physical interactions between bacteria during swarming, we’re also interested in the role that chemical communication plays in the development of swarms. And swarming is just an early stage of biofilm development, so we are also interested in biofilms, which are basically bacterial communities that are firmly attached to surfaces.
One question that’s been in the field for a long time is, what is the length scale over which these chemical signals can be propagated? That is, if you have a swarm or a small early-stage biofilm that’s secreting signals, how far away does another biofilm have to be before it can no longer eavesdrop? To answer this question we created a microtool that we call the waffle.

The waffle?

You know how waffles have those little squares, right? Well, instead of the waffle being bread, the waffle in our case is made out of a special gel, and we can control the size of the cubes in the waffle and the thickness of the walls between them.

Using this tool we can grow biofilms that are spatially confined from each other. So you can take an organism that’s engineered to send a signal and then another organism that’s engineered to produce green fluorescent protein or some other measurable reporter protein when it receives that signal. You put these bacteria into various regions of the waffle and let them grow into biofilms. The walls physically constrain the cells, but they permit the free diffusion of small molecules. So the chemicals just diffuse through the waffle and then we measure and quantify the level of activation of the signal-receiving biofilm at different length scales away from the signal-sending biofilm.

We’ve used this waffle tool to determine that biofilms can eavesdrop on each other when they’re within about one centimeter. One interesting thing we found is that the chemical signals from one biofilm really don’t seem to have a substantial effect on nearby biofilms. That was a little bit surprising to us! The signal had a slight effect on growth rates, but it really had no obvious effect on community structure.

So what does that tell us? Mainly that we have a really incomplete understanding of chemical signaling in bacteria. There’s a lot left to learn.

Are there long-term applications for this work?

Eventually we want to look for small molecules that can disrupt the ability of bacteria to differentiate into the swarming phenotype, as well as molecules that promote this behavior. We’ll use these as research tools to study swarming in more depth in the lab, but you can imagine that small molecules that can disrupt bacterial swarming could have a biomedical use. They could be new antibiotics.

And, actually, we already have some really cool compounds, and we’re working with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation to patent some of them. We found most of them through high-throughput screening, using the UW-Madison Keck Laboratory for Biological Imaging’s library of approximately 80,000 unique small molecules. Big pharma does this kind of stuff all of the time. They screen huge libraries of millions of compounds against a target, usually a well-validated target. The difference is we’re studying targets that nobody has worked with before. There just aren’t that many people in academia screening small molecules against certain classes of cell biological proteins. And we’ve found quite a few promising antibiotic compounds this way.

This story was originally published in the fall 2012 issue of Grow magazine.

“I’ve always been interested in human health and the environment, but as a high schooler I had a hard time connecting the two,” says Jentz. “After coming to Madison and reading up on the Slow Food movement, I realized that the two are intricately connected.”

Jentz got involved with Slow Food UW–Madison, the campus branch of a global grassroots organization with supporters in more than 150 countries. Founded some 20 years ago in Italy, Slow Food’s mission is to counter the rise of fast food by supporting locally grown food and accompanying traditions.

Slow Food–UW offers a wide range of activities. During the school year the group prepares and serves weekly lunches and dinners as well as fruit and vegetable baskets using produce from local farms and small wholesalers. Slow Food UW also conducts service projects year-round, including planting gardens and cooking weekly meals with kids in the Boys and Girls Club in south Madison.

“We’re teaching kids how to eat healthy and are supporting a better future for their bodies and their community—environmentally, economically and socially,” says Jentz, who helped submit a successful Wisconsin Idea Fellowship grant to expand the program. “It’s great to know that my weekly fun break from homework is making a difference!”

Jentz graduates in December with a degree in community and environmental sociology, but she’ll continue to work with young people through Slow Food; she’d like to add children with disabilities to the program, inspired in part by a younger brother with autism. Her plans include earning a master’s degree in public health and then going for her big dream: to start a business on her family’s farm in Platteville that would combine operating a café and organic farming with raising animals (particularly horses) for use in therapy and a day camp where “people, especially those with disabilities, can learn to grow and cook for themselves and others in the community.”

This student profile was originally published in the Fall 2012 issue of Grow magazine.

Read more about the project in this news release.

This profile was originally published in the summer 2012 issue of Grow magazine.

And he wants the field to look as perfect as it plays. No other patch of turf in Wisconsin gets as many looks as these two acres, and Boettcher has exact standards for the landscapes under his care. That began when he was growing up on his family’s Jackson County farm, where taking care of the grounds was one of his favorite chores. Even though he now has a crew of 40 to maintain the 250-acre Miller Park campus, he still climbs on the mower when he gets a chance to cut those perfect crosshatched patterns. Mowing is soothing, he says, and he loves the smell of fresh-cut grass.

Boettcher got his start in pro sports through a summer internship with Gary VandenBerg, the Brewers’ head groundskeeper. He loved it, and he made a good impression. Two years after graduation, the club invited him to join its landscape team and later promoted him to become VandenBerg’s first assistant. When VandenBerg passed away last fall after a battle with cancer, Boettcher took over his responsibilities for the remainder of the season.

Read more about Boettcher's job at Miller Park in the summer 2012 issue of Grow magazine.

A Q & A with Fadl about his salmonella vaccine:

Let’s start with salmonella. What is it and how does it get in our food supply?

Salmonella is one of the major foodborne pathogens. It’s a zoonotic pathogen, which means it can be passed between humans and animals. Humans mostly get infected by eating contaminated meat from infected animals. Unfortunately, a significant number of chickens in our nation’s poultry operations are carriers of this pathogen. They have it in their intestines but don’t show any symptoms or signs of sickness. So during meat processing, salmonella from the intestines can sometimes contaminate the carcass, the meat. As for eggs, salmonella either can be on the outside, on the eggshell, or inside, in the yolk. A significant proportion of eggs are contaminated, so that’s why people always recommend that eggs be cooked properly before eating.

How big of a problem is this?

It’s big. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are about two million cases of salmonella infection in humans every year, but many people just have minor abdominal cramps so they don’t go to the hospital. About 43,000 people actually go to the hospital and provide samples that confirm salmonella infection.

And it can be a big problem for poultry producers, too. Consider last summer’s salmonella outbreak that was linked back to an Iowa egg-producing farm. Many millions of eggs had to be recalled, so that was a huge economic loss. And not only that, but production on this farm was basically stopped for a significant period of time—months—until regulators made sure that they had cleaned everything, sanitized everything and figured out the source of the contamination.

Overall, salmonella is believed to have a total economic cost of more than $1 billion dollars per year.

How would an animal vaccine help?

The whole issue here is how we are going to reduce salmonella outbreaks in humans. Our approach is to stop the infection at the source. Before chickens are harvested, we want to make sure that they are free of salmonella. One way to do this is by administering a vaccine that inhibits the colonization of salmonella in the intestinal tract. This breaks the chain of infection at the source.

How does your vaccine work?

Our vaccine is a weakened form of the pathogen. It’s called a live attenuated vaccine. To make it, we deleted a gene from the salmonella genome known as gidA, which controls the production of a suite of disease factors and co-factors. You can immunize mice with our mutant strain, and then challenge the animals later with a lethal dose of regular salmonella and nothing happens. They stay healthy.

Now we need to test it in chickens to make sure that this vaccine is indeed capable of blocking or reducing the colonization of salmonella in the intestinal tract of these animals. If it does, we can look to take it to the next level.

When will your vaccine become commercially available?

It’s a long process. There are several steps that any potential vaccine must go through before it can be licensed to be used in animals or humans. There’s the lab work, clinical trials, safety testing, quality testing. And after that comes the process of commercial manufacturing. If everything goes well, it’ll take five to 10 years.

Are there salmonella vaccines already on the market?

I only know of one vaccine that’s on the market right now, although some others are currently being developed. So far, vaccinating chickens in the United States against salmonella isn’t routine, as it is in Europe. In Europe there is a different form of salmonella that is really nasty. It produces a very high mortality rate in chickens. With the help of the vaccination they were able to reduce the number of outbreaks and mortality in the European poultry industry. They have been vaccinating for the past decade or more.

Fortunately, we don’t see that form of salmonella much in the United States, so there isn’t a huge market here for a vaccine right now. But we don’t know what will happen later on. The USDA and the FDA could decide that animals must be vaccinated.

How is your vaccine different or better than the other vaccines out there?

There are three important things for a salmonella vaccine: It’s protective, it reduces salmonella colonization in the gut and it produces mucosal antibodies. Our vaccine could be better on one or more of these fronts, but you never know. The data is going to tell us that.

There are actually two types of vaccines—live attenuated vaccines like ours and killed vaccines—each with pros and cons. Killed vaccines are considered safe because the pathogen is killed, but they only induce a weak form of immunity because they don’t interact with the host immune system in the same way as a live bacterium. Live attenuated vaccines, on the other hand, actually multiply in the host system, interacting with it in the same way that disease-causing pathogens do, so they trigger a stronger immune response and provide better protection. However, people are always concerned that there’s a possibility that the weakened pathogen will revert back to its original pathogenic form.

To address this, we’ve also developed a salmonella mutant that has gidA and another gene knocked out. This double mutant has the same quality, the same protection, the same everything as the single gidA mutant strain. But the good thing about it is that two genes have been deleted, so it’s much safer because it’s much less likely to randomly revert back to the pathogenic form. This is where our vaccine has a real advantage. And we are continuously looking for other factors that we can delete that will make our live vaccine safer, while at the same time maintaining its ability to induce a strong immune response.

What could encourage American poultry famers to start using salmonella vaccines?

Paying for vaccines is like buying insurance. For example, if you look at the Iowa farm that had the contaminated eggs, maybe the owners will think twice about vaccination because of what they went through. Maybe they will tell you that they would have rather taken the loss in their flock’s weight and productivity for a day or two that comes with vaccination than deal with the whole recall process. And it only costs a few cents per bird to vaccinate.

This story was originally published in the summer 2012 issue of Grow magazine.

“Did you ever see Waiting for Superman?” she asks, referring to the documentary about getting into a charter school per lottery. “That’s how my parents were, trying to get me into whichever school was better and closest to where we lived.”

Allen’s father had a high school diploma and her mother, an associate of arts degree in accounting. They were thrilled when Allen was selected for Posse, a program that sends promising students from urban high schools to top colleges in small groups. Posse Scholars receive full scholarships, and the group acts as a support system to ensure that each member graduates.

Allen found other communities on campus. She learned about biological systems engineering from CALS assistant dean Tom Browne and tried some classes. “I just fell in love with the atmosphere, the students and, most important, the teachers,” she says.

And she served as president of Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Related Sciences (MANRRS) and the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), for whom she raised a record-breaking $95,000 for a regional conference. Allen also volunteered with after-school science clubs and other youth groups, hoping to encourage minority kids, especially girls, to enter science professions.

For nearly two years Allen worked as a research assistant and a McNair Scholar in the lab of chemical engineering professor Daniel Klingenberg on biofuel applications for corn stover. She earned her bachelor’s degree in May and is setting her sights on a PhD, most likely in bioengineering.

She speaks enthusiastically about advancements in creating artificial organs and other devices that can be implanted in the body to improve and save lives. “That’s really where my passion lies,” she says. And wherever she goes, Allen plans to continue building supportive communities for students coming in behind her.

This story was originally published in the summer 2012 issue of Grow magazine.