Six undergraduate students from the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) attended the annual World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa during October. This three-day event is known as “the premier conference in the world on global agriculture.”

The selected students, whose registration and travel were sponsored by the ACES Office of International Programs and the ACES Office of Academic Programs, included (left to right in photo):  

The Office of International Programs in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) hosted seven Fulbright Scholars from Lebanon as part of the U.S. Department of State’s Fulbright Junior Faculty Development Program in rural and economic development.  

As a PhD student in Agricultural and Consumer Economics advised by Dr. Kathy Baylis, Patrese Anderson is working with a multidisciplinary research team to understand climate change’s effects on smallholder farmers dependent on rain fed agricultural systems.

During the summer of 2017, she used funds provided by the ACES International Graduate Grants program to travel to Zambia to oversee the data collection of 1200 household surveys to be used by this research team to help Zambia ensure livelihoods and attain food security.  

Dennis Humberto Pinto Padilla, a M.S. student in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition advised by Dr. Nicki Engeseth, used funds from an ACES international graduate grant to find optimal conditions for producing chocolate in tropical regions.

Pinto’s research focuses on a problem that plagues tropical regions with chocolate – the temperature of storage is often too high, resulting in rapid bloom formation and melting. His goal is to find low-cost, low energy-requiring strategies for temperature stability and therefore better chocolate production in these regions.