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...

I was born and raised in Costa Rica, a tropical country in Central America. Costa Rica is very small, but it has an enormous variety of landscapes -- from rainforests to mangroves, to large or small farms with many different crops, like bananas and coffee. It is hard to grow up in a place like this and not appreciate its biodiversity. As a kid, I spent a lot of time outdoors and I remember always being fascinated by plants and all sorts of insects. Good Advice From My Mom Before college, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to study. I disliked the thought of an office job and I wanted...

Did you know that cranberries are some of the very few cultivated fruits that are native to North America? Also, they are related to blueberries, which is another popular, native fruit. Many people think that cranberries grow in water, but they don’t. Water is used to help harvest the fruit in the fall, but the rest of the year cranberry plants grow in sandy marshes with very acidic soils called bogs. I live in Massachusetts and my work is to study plant diseases that affect cranberries. Massachusetts is where cranberries were first cultivated and it’s still one of the top three cranberry-...