Faculty Staff Bios

Forest ranger dreams turned water champion: Marie-Françoise Hatte's incredible journey protecting New England's waterways. What was her most memorable field work experience? And why does she say rivers are like wild animals?

Lacresha Bowers began her current position as the UMass Extension Nutrition Education Program (NEP) Director on September 5th. Since then, she has been developing curriculum, alongside nutrition program educators, to improve the nutritional health of people who are food insecure in Massachusetts. 

Growing up on a farm in Vermont, Clem understood that University Extension Programs are essential resources for sustainable land management, especially his family's land. He now works as Director of the UMass Extension Agriculture Program, organizing the team that helps Massachusetts farms succeed. 

Stephen Oram’s gentle and thoughtful approach to nutrition education is clear from the minute you begin speaking with him. As a UMass Extension Nutrition Educator, Oram believes in the importance of food as a unifying force and simple joy in life.

There aren’t many people who say things like, “I always really liked nitrogen… It’s just an element that has really struck me.” Ashley Keiser is one of those people. Her passion for all-things ecosystem ecology is infectious.
 

As an interdisciplinary environmental social scientist, Ezra Markowitz has two foremost passions: human behavior and environmental conservation. These two passions stem from his childhood and upbringing in the suburbs of New York. Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, Markowitz spent his formative years exploring the forested landscape of his backyard and hometown, a time during which he learned to care deeply for the environment. Later, in high school, Markowitz took a few psychology classes, wherein he quickly fell in love with the study of human behavior.

While Hannah Whitehead has been working at the University of Massachusetts Extension for four years, her journey to get here took her on a rich, life-building trek. 

Whitehead was hired by UMass in 2018 as a honey bee extension educator. In that role, she offered workshops on beekeeping topics, wrote fact sheets, and conducted research on bee health. In July 2021, Whitehead joined the UMass vegetable extension team.

Meaghan (Meg) McDermott calls her Worcester office “home base” but loves that her work allows her to travel throughout the large county for club meetings and myriad programs. The UMass 4-H educator is an enthusiastic cheerleader for 4-H, which is no surprise since she cut her teeth in Norfolk County’s 4-H program as a youngster.

Growing up in Buckland, Elizabeth Garofalo remembers experiencing four distinct seasons by walking through her immediate environment, an orchard just down the road from her home. Every spring, tractors mowed fields, summer fruit was easily plucked from low-hanging branches, and a “lovely elderly woman” invited her to climb apples trees in the fall. Seasonal orientation is also in her blood with her grandparents’ dairy farm and other generational agriculture tasks flowing through her veins.  However, as an adult, the journey to the University of Massachusetts to become a well-respected Extension educator, has been a long and winding road.

Jim Cronk is a farm boy at heart. His grandmother owned a large farm in Des Moines, Iowa, where she grew corn and raised livestock and Jim’s mother had a green thumb. Turns out that love of farming the land has filtered down through the generations to him. For seven years Jim was employed in the landscaping business. There he built a solid foundation that provided him with the expertise to grow and maintain a variety of perennials, annual flowers, shrubs and trees and to understand factors needed for healthy growth (soil, nutrients, etc.). This background also provided a launching point for working at the University of Massachusetts Cold Spring Orchard (CSO) in Belchertown.  

Heather Lohr began work with UMass Extension in 2013 at the Extension Bookstore and then became part of the administration team for the Center for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (CAFE) in 2014. She now assists CAFE assistant director William Miller in managing Experiment Station and Extension planning and reporting, along with other responsibilities.  She reports that she finds herself interested in learning about the internal workings of CAFE, how all the pieces fit together, and how she can contribute to the success of the Center and everyone it serves. 

Madeleine Charney is a research services librarian with the UMass Libraries. She specializes in topics close to the heart of anyone interested in agriculture, food or the environment. Charney has seen an evolution of her tasks from the love of books, when she steered students toward library stacks, to managing data and offering information on open access.

Paulina Borrego is a naturally curious person, the very quality one hopes for in a librarian. However, if your image of a librarian is one who shushes people with a stern personality, Paulina will help you ditch those expectations at the door. Borrego is eager to help those looking for guidance.

Sai Sree Uppala focuses on cranberry pathology at the UMass Cranberry Station in Wareham. She is intrigued by the resilient and unique nature of cranberries compared to most other agricultural crops.