The UGA Sustainable Food Systems Initiative has awarded three interdisciplinary teams of faculty with its third round of Sustainable Food Systems Fellowships.
These fellowships, which will be given to graduate students beginning in fall 2017, will be paid for by a grant from the USDA National Institute for Food and Agriculture. This is the second NIFA grant that the initiative has received to fund its fellowships. Six master’s degree students have benefited from this program since 2013.
The initiative’s goal is to set up a collaborative framework to enable interdepartmental faculty to collaborate on questions of agricultural production, energy, water, the environment, economics, health and nutrition.
The selection committee has chosen three projects for funding:
• Warnell School of Forestry associate professor Robert Bringolf and College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences assistant professor Nick Fuhrman will develop a resource program for teaching farmers about sustainable aquaponics systems.
• College of Family and Consumer Sciences assistant professor Chad Paton and senior research scientist Dave Hoisington, director of the UGA-housed U.S. Feed the Future Peanut and Mycotoxin Innovation Lab, will investigate improving agricultural production methods of increasing vitamin A intake in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Assistant professors Janani Rajbhandari-Thapa and Donglan Zhan in the College of Public Health’s health policy and management department and assistant professor Melissa Hallow in the College of Engineering and epidemiology and biostatistics department will investigate and model the interaction between consumer behavior and food supply and how that relationship can help support a healthy and sustainable food system in Georgia.
