Names in the News

Schweikert joins UC ANR as controller 

Lana Schweikert joined UC ANR as controller on Jan. 15. She will join other senior leaders and managers to help formulate and implement UC ANR's strategic plans and objectives, especially in matters related to financial controls, financial systems and reporting policies.

Schweikert will have lead responsibility for organization-wide business services, compliance, and internal controls. This includes primary responsibility for regental policy compliance, enterprise risk management and internal controls initiatives. She also will be responsible for coordination of risk assessment and management with leaders across UC ANR.

As controller, she will report to the associate vice president of business operation, with a dotted-line reporting relationship to the UC systemwide controller in matters relating to accounting and financial reporting policies.

She brings experience as a controller in the private sector and, most recently, as director of general accounting at UC Irvine.

Schweikert holds a bachelor's degree in accounting from the University of Portland and an MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. She is a certified public accountant.

Schweikert is based at UCOP in Oakland and can be reached at lana.schweikert@ucop.edu and lschweikert@ucanr.edu. 

Agyeman joins UCCE as economics advisor for Butte, Glenn and Tehama counties 

Domena Agyeman joined UCCE Jan. 3 as an agriculture and natural resources economics advisor for Butte, Glenn and Tehama counties.

Prior to joining UC ANR, he was a postdoctoral associate at the Virginia Seafood Agricultural Research and Extension Center at Virginia Tech University.

As a UCCE advisor, Agyeman will provide insights that ensure economic profitability of all agriculture activities, including orchards, rice, forestry and other natural resources-based businesses in those counties. He will also promote broadband access and contribute to regional economic development.  

“I am excited to leverage my expertise to highlight the economic contributions and impacts of the agriculture and natural resources industries in Butte, Glenn and Tehama counties,” Agyeman said, “and to provide producers and other stakeholders in the region with research-based information that will help them navigate their business challenges and opportunities.”

His research interests encompass natural resources and environmental policy impact assessments, economic contributions and impacts analyses, producer decision-making assessments, and consumer preferences assessments. 

“To get started, I will be doing a needs assessment, focus group meetings and surveys of target groups,” he said.

Agyeman earned a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from the University of Kentucky, a master's degree in agricultural economics from Mississippi State University and bachelor's degree in agricultural science from University of Cape Coast in Ghana.

Agyeman is based at the UCCE office in Oroville and can be reached at dagyeman@ucanr.edu.

Marsh named UCCE rice advisor for Colusa and Yolo counties 

Sarah Marsh joined UCCE on Jan. 3 as a rice farming systems advisor serving Colusa and Yolo counties.

Prior to joining UCCE, she worked in rice breeding research and integrative pest management with several row crops in the Upper Gulf Coast region.

She earned a master's degree in horticulture and agronomy at UC Davis, where she worked with Kassim Al-Khatib, professor of plant sciences, studying weeds and herbicide resistance in rice agroecosystems. She holds a bachelor's degree in plant and environmental soil science from Texas A&M University. 

“I grew up on a diversified row-crop and orchard farm in Arbuckle and am grateful for the opportunity to serve the community in which I was raised,” Marsh said. “I hope to spend the first few months getting to know the growers and community of this region and learning what the unique needs of our area are.”

Marsh is based at the UCCE office in Colusa and can be reached at smarsh@ucanr.edu and (530) 415-7052. 

Woelfle-Hazard joins UCCE Humboldt-Del Norte as fire advisor 

Cleo Aster Woelfle-Hazard joined UCCE on Jan. 3 as a fire advisor for Humboldt and Del Norte counties. He will support residents, landowners, planners, land managers, tribes and Native fire practitioners in making North Coast communities more resilient in the face of intensifying wildfires.

His research and extension programs focus on climate resilience, cultural burning, fire-water interactions and training a diverse fire workforce.

Woelfle-Hazard collaborates on research with Native nations, agencies, citizen scientists and local community members. In collaboration with the Karuk Department of Natural Resources, he is exploring future fire scenarios in the Klamath Basin and how streamflow would change. They are also exploring how fire and flooding can be renewed to revitalize habitat for ecocultural species such as willow, grape, salmon, elk and eel.

His past projects have included community-directed river research with frontline communities in Seattle, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and Sonoma County. Using his expertise in home water and wastewater systems, he evaluated health and economic aspects of water delivery in Oakland and Hubli-Dharwad, India.

As a co-investigator on the Humanities Education for Anti-Racism Literacy project, Woelfle-Hazard collaborated on creating pathways to higher education for Native youth, and for training students to engage in respectful collaborations with Native partners.

He earned a master's degree and Ph.D. in energy and resources at UC Berkeley, where he convened scientists and Sonoma County residents to experiment with capturing winter rain to increase summer streamflow to benefit juvenile salmon, and exploring the possibilities of working with beavers to create cool refuges for coho. He also holds a bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary geosciences from the University of Montana.

As a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz, Woelfle-Hazard drew field experience together with queer, transgender and Indigenous theory. His book “Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice” argues that rivers' future vitality requires centering the values of justice, sovereignty and dynamism.

“As a White settler who identifies as queer and transgender, I have experienced privileges and discrimination in natural resources work,” Woelfle-Hazard said. “I am deeply committed to the never-ending work of uprooting racism and settler colonialism in the university and society.”

“I am excited to continue this work at UC ANR,” he said. “In the future, I also hope to develop a QTREX program to train and support queer and trans fire practitioners, modeled on the WTREX (Women-in-Fire Prescribed Fire Training Exchange) and Indigenous Women's TREX programs.”

Woelfle-Hazard is based in Eureka and can be reached at cwhaz@ucanr.edu.

Wauters joins UC SAREP to advance climate adaptation 

Vivian Wauters joined UC SAREP as a project scientist on Jan. 1.

In this role, Wauters is working with Sonja Brodt on a project to support co-learning and institutional capacity-building within a multi-organizational network to help accelerate adoption of climate-adaptive and climate-mitigating practices among California farmers.

Activities within this project include strengthening the California Farm Demonstration Network through institutional capacity-building and applied, participatory on-farm research. She will be facilitating a soil health assessment that will support farmer decision-making and establish a baseline for continued investigation of California-specific soil health and resilience indicators. 

Wauters is interested in how we can foster agroecological transitions and transformations, and how the collaboration of multiple forms of knowledge and expertise can build capacity for stewarding multifunctional agricultural systems. 

Prior to joining UC SAREP, she was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis. Wauters, who grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills, also has been a vegetable farm worker in Minnesota and California.

She holds a Ph.D. in applied plant sciences–agronomy/agroecology from University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and a master's degree in linguistics from UC Berkeley.

Wauters is based in Davis at the UC ANR building and can be reached at vwauters@ucanr.edu and (530) 240-3527.

Leauthaud joins UCCE as agroecology specialist at UCSC 

Crystele Leauthaud joined UC ANR on Dec. 1 as a UCCE agroecology specialist based at UC Santa Cruz working on agroecology, climate change and water management. Her research and outreach activities address the socio-environmental crisis related to climate change and water resources. She works with local, regional, state and national partners and clientele on grower-focused, applied research and outreach. 

“I am interested in how to take into account irrigation and water management needs as we design the agroecological transition of agricultural systems in a climate-changing context,” Leauthaud said, “as well as working with farmers to quantify water usage and building new ways of managing irrigation.”

Her areas of expertise are holistic and systemic approaches to characterize farming systems, agroecological practices such as compost teas and agroforestry, Mediterranean agriculture, participatory research, irrigation monitoring and scheduling with a focus on open-source, low-cost, do-it-yourself sensors. 

Leauthaud brings over a decade of experience in research and extension activities, including studying wetland systems in semi-arid Africa (Tana River Delta, Kenya), hydrological modeling of natural and crop systems in the Sahel region in West-Africa, and agronomy applied to water management in North Africa. From 2016 to 2023, she researched agronomy of hydrosystems at the CIRAD institute in France. Read more at https://sites.google.com/site/leauthaud/research-projects?authuser=0. 

She earned a Ph.D. in water and environmental sciences from the University of Montpellier, France; a master's degree in ecology from the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle, France; and an engineering degree in agronomy from AgroParisTech, France.

“I am really excited to be part of a larger community working on sustainable agriculture and water management in California,” Leauthaud said. “I look forward to learning from and contributing to building and sharing knowledge and experiences with you all!”

Leauthaud is based in the UCSC Center for Agroecology and the Department of Environmental Studies and can be reached at (831) 499-5016 and cleautha@ucsc.edu and on Facebook and LinkedIn. 

UCCE nutrition specialist Smilowitz focuses on early life stages 

Jennifer T. Smilowitz joined UC ANR on Nov. 1, 2023, as a UC Cooperative Extension specialist in nutrition and health equity in the Department of Nutrition at UC Davis. Smilowitz's research and outreach are focused on identifying and addressing gaps in health equity, health skills and education; access to healthful foods; and other factors that contribute to health and community resilience and chronic disease risk reduction.

Specifically, Smilowitz emphasizes the continuum from pregnancy through a child's 2nd birthday or first 1,000 days – a critical period in life when diet largely influences long-lasting health in both women and their children. 

“I'm motivated to empower families with early-life diet and lifestyle interventions and education and to improve health policies that lead to optimal health trajectories of Californians,” she said.

Smilowitz's new multidisciplinary community-health program, Outreach & Research Implementing Advancements in Nutrition Equity (ORIANE, a French/Latin word meaning “sunrise”), aims to implement and test evidence-based nutrition interventions with a focus in the first 1,000 days. In addition to creating educational programs on nutrition and health using multimedia to empower families (especially within racially diverse, low-income communities), ORIANE also seeks to deliver professional training on nutrition-related topics to health care providers, community professionals, educators and advocates. 

Smilowitz attained her bachelor's degree in molecular, cell and developmental biology at UCLA and holds a doctoral degree in nutritional biology with an emphasis in endocrinology from UC Davis. She completed her postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Food Science & Technology at UC Davis in 2013. 

Since becoming a certified lactation education counselor in 2015, Smilowitz has conducted lactation education for women during pregnancy and in the postpartum period. She conducts outreach on the benefits of breastfeeding through lectures and webinars for health-care practitioners across Northern California hospitals and clinics and for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program staff.

Smilowitz can be reached at jensm@ucdavis.edu; she is on X (Twitter) @UCDavis_MOM and LinkedIn.

Costa named UCCE rural community disaster preparedness specialist 

Lais Costa joined the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine on Aug. 1, 2023, in the Department of Population, Health & Reproduction as an assistant professor of Cooperative Extension for rural community disaster preparedness.

Costa's research is focused on animal health and welfare, safety and disaster preparedness. 

Costa has held a variety of clinical academic positions, predominately as an equine internist, research specialist or associate veterinarian at Tufts University, Mississippi State University and UC Davis. In 2018, she was hired as the lead veterinarian for the UC Davis Veterinary Emergency Response Team and in 2021 she also assumed responsibilities as the Director of the International Animal Welfare Training Institute.

Costa received her master's in veterinary medicine from São Paulo State University, Brazil and her master's degree at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. She completed her doctor of veterinary medicine equivalence from the American Veterinary Medical Association Educational Commission for Foreign Veterinary Graduates. Costa received her Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. She also attained dual Diplomate status with the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine (Large Animal, 1999) and the American Board of Veterinary Practitioners (Equine Practice certification 2006, recertification 2016).  Costa is certified as a veterinary acupuncturist with the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society.

She can be reached at lrcosta@ucdavis.edu.

 

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