Our February Expert: Erika Rojas

Feb 1, 2017 By Dr. Erika Rojas
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Do you know where the food you ate for breakfast came from? 

Whatever you ate was probably a plant crop in an agriculture field at some point. Or if you ate eggs, the food that chickens ate were plants raised on a farm!   

Not a lot of people know this, but plants can also get sick. And that’s where I come in; my job is to study plant diseases and figure out how farmers can keep their crops healthy until you eat them.

My name is Erika Saalau Rojas and I am a plant pathologist at the University of Massachusetts. I earned my Ph.D. from Iowa State University (ISU) in plant pathology and worked on the diagnosis of plant diseases at the ISU Plant and Insect Diagnostic Clinic. At UMass, I am working on programs to develop best practices for managing plant diseases.