Mary Lu Arpaia with Edna Pesis at the Volcani Institute

Two events greatly influenced where I am today. 

First, after graduating from UC Berkeley (UCB) with a Botany degree I went to Sierra Leone, West Africa to visit my then boyfriend (later husband for 23 years), and ended up teaching secondary school there.  I was thinking about going to graduate school in ecology.  While in Sierra Leone, a professor from Rutgers (B. L. Pollack) came to give training to the agricultural Peace Corp volunteers, which I attended even though I was not a volunteer.  I spoke to him about my graduate school plans, and he encouraged me to pursue agriculture and to apply to UC Davis.  This is what I did.  The other thing in Sierra Leone that greatly influenced me was, wherever you talked to people involved in agriculture, it was a near unanimous consent that everyone wanted to go to a place called DAVIS to study.  Coming from UCB, this blew my mind.

Secondly, I ended up in postharvest due to the guidance of two people, F. Gordon Mitchell and Adel Kader, two individuals that had a lasting influence on me.  My grades at UCB, while good, were not stellar, so at that time in 1978 I did not get a graduate assistantship, but work study.  Gordon hired me to work in the postharvest lab and provided me the freedom to learn about extension and how to do research.  Adel helped by offering encouragement and also allowing me to learn how to conduct research and extension programs.  I feel that I am extremely fortunate to have studied under them. They both had different approaches to science and extension, etc. but both were exceptional mentors, both during my graduate student years but also during my career.  Both their “doors” were always open.

You travel quite a bit.  In the past year, have you had any extraordinary experiences while traveling? 

Extraordinary? … No.  But I like to travel to other countries that grow subtropical fruit, no matter how advanced the industry.  Why?  Because there is always something new to learn and to bring back that influences how I approach my job in California.  The important thing is always to try to have an open mind and not have preconceived notions about what should or should not be.  I often feel that I learn more than any knowledge that I leave behind.

In the past six months or so, have you learned anything new that you find especially interesting? 

In March, I traveled to Israel with David Obenland and Anne Plotto on a BARD project.  Although I have been there before, the previous trips focused on avocados.  Much of this 2013 trip focused on citrus, and we visited with Ron Porat and his colleagues.  This was a very worthwhile trip since we visited orchards, packinghouses and attended a one day symposium on Flavor held at the Volcani Institute. This symposium was very interesting and stimulated much discussion about sensory studies and its role in postharvest research, an area where much of my effort is focused.