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.