News

The West Virginia University Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design will welcome Larry Nielsen, professor of natural resources at North Carolina State University, as this year’s Davis-Michael Distinguished Lecturer.

The work of several West Virginia University researchers from the Davis College Division of Plant and Soil Sciences and Eberly College of Arts and Sciences was recently featured on the front cover of the Journal of Chemical Education. Their article, "Demonstrating the Effect of Surfactant on Water Retention of Waxy Leaf Surfaces," reports on their development of chemistry and biology lab curriculum. This curriculum development, led primarily by Kang Mo Ku, assistant professor of horticulture in the Davis College Division of Plant and Soil Sciences, and his graduate research assistant, Yu-Chun Chiu, is both inexpensive and accessible to undergraduate students, albeit not limited exclusively to them, as it is also accessible to middle school and high school students. The curriculum allows all students to gain hands-on learning experience while using technology with which they are quite familiar -- their own smartphones.

For more than half his life, Mannon Gallegly, West Virginia University professor emeritus of plant pathology, has been perfecting the tomato. In 1950, his research on vegetable diseases and tomato blight at WVU led him on a 13-year journey that culminated with the West Virginia ’63, also dubbed the “people’s tomato,” released in 1963 and rereleased in 2013 to help commemorate West Virginia’s 100th and 150th birthdays, respectively.

The West Virginia Bull Evaluation Program, commonly referred to as the Wardensville Bull Test, was introduced to this  West Virginia University farm in 1967. The evaluation center, sponsored by the West Virginia Cattlemen’s Association, West Virginia Department of Agriculture,  WVU Extension Service, and  WVU Division of Animal and Nutritional Sciences, is available to mid-size seedstock breeders and is designed to identify genetically superior bulls and increase profitability of commercial cattlemen in West Virginia and the Mid-Atlantic Region.