Food & Water Security

We are grateful for the primary financial support for this work provided by the NSF grant BCS-1539795; and secondary support for part of this work was from the project Assessment of Diversification Strategies in Smallholder Coffee Systems (No AF 1507-086: No FDNC Engt 00063479) supported under the “Thought for Food” Initiative of the Agropolis Foundation (through the ”Investissements d’avenir“ programme with reference number ANR10-LABX-0001-01), Fondazione Cariplo and Daniel & Nina Carasso. Additional support for this work was from the Community Agroecology Network, the Santa Clara University’s Ignatian Institute for Jesuit Education’s Bannan Institute, Office of the Provost, Dean of Arts and Sciences, Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, Leavey School of Business, Center for Food Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

Special thanks to research assistance from our Nicaragua partners: Raúl Diaz, Miseal Rivas, Rudy Espinosa, Jorge Iran Valasquez, Maria Eugenia Flores Gomez, Edrulfo Rodriguez, Erica Perez and numerous promotores and farmers including Marvin Espinosa and Maximino Guiterrez, and SCU undergraduate research assistants: Amanda Alipaz, Gabriella Ballardo, Lauren Cloward, Christopher Esparza, Kimy Grandi Soriano, Lindsay Tenes, Deja Thomas, Skyler Kriese, Martín Pérez, Vanessa Shin, and Claire Smoker.

Recognizing that climate change and other hazards are forcing farmers to adapt to a changing context, Santa Clara University Professors Christopher M. Bacon (Environmental Studies & Sciences), William A. Sundstrom (Economics and Data Analysis), Iris T. Stewart (Environmental Studies & Sciences), Ed Maurer (Civil Engineering), and, former SCU postdoc, and current University of Colorado Denver Assistant professor, Lisa C. Kelley (Geography & Environmental Science) recently published a peer reviewed open access article in World Development. This article is one of the culminating pieces emerging from five years of National Science Foundation funded research exploring the effects of climate variability and change on the food and water security of smallholder farmers in Nicaragua. To address the gaps in existing climate adaptation and resource security research, the research team developed “an integrated framework for assessing household food and water insecurity using both perceptual and climate measurements and careful spatial and temporal analysis of household responses to hazards.” This is one of the first studies to analyze household seasonal food and water simultaneously. Using this integrated framework, the team found that seasonal patterns such as crop price, agricultural calendars, and precipitation correlate with farmers’ vulnerability to food and water insecurity, leading to 5-6 months of resource scarcity for farmers (see Figure). Findings show that food and water insecurity are positively correlated across households and that this relationship is not “a consequence of time-invariant household characteristics (fixed effects).” Researchers also conducted farmer interviews, ethnographic research and collected contextual data concluding that farmer’s vulnerability to food and water insecurity is exacerbated by both household dynamics and exposure to interannual events, such as drought, coffee rust, and shifting commodity prices. Cognizant of their goal of providing tangible action items, the research team found that higher incomes, larger farm areas, and diversified farm production are correlated with improved food and water security for smallholder households in Nicaragua. To help address structural obstacles to meeting these basic needs and reducing vulnerability, the team suggests using this evidence to inform community-based and participatory strategies that use agroecology to build food and water sovereignty.

By Chloe Gentile-Montgomery with Christopher M Bacon

Although many people like to joke about college students hanging around campus for the free food, or eating a diet consisting mainly of Ramen noodles, behind this trope is an injustice and failure to secure an important human right to food for college-going students. Food insecurity was already a growing problem across college campuses in the United States, before  COVID-19 significantly exacerbated these challenges. Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. The flip of food security is food insecurity, in which we encounter obstacles as individuals or families strive to maintain food availability, access, utilization, stability, and their own agency.

Beyond the negative health impacts of food insecurity and hunger, students who are food insecure are more likely to struggle with their academics due to lack of proper nutrition, making food insecurity a risk to students’ completion and retention rate. Even at a school like SCU, where the completion rate is rather high, students may be impacted by dropping grades in other ways as well, such as being disqualified for a scholarship or job opportunity due to a low GPA. It is imperative for institutions to have a plan to combat food insecurity as it often becomes a social justice issue wherein low income and BIPOC students are more heavily impacted. It is currently estimated that 38% of students at 4-year institutions are experiencing food insecurity and food pantries are needing to get creative to keep up with demand. Unfortunately, there has not been adequate research done on what these numbers look like at private non-profit universities, as  only 6% of institutions participating in Hope Lab research are private colleges and universities.  (REAL College 2020: Five Years of Evidence on Campus Basic Needs Insecurity). To learn more about how food and housing insecurity impact students across the country, check out this presentation from Hope Lab and the following graphs.

Despite being thoroughly researched at various universities across the country, student food insecurity has not yet been systematically studied or funded at Santa Clara University.  The Bronco Food Pantry has done grassroots work to support students and are planning to scale up. Alongside Dr. Bacon in the ESS department, we are developing a research project to look into how food insecurity is impacting SCU students and to propose solutions to better support all students in accessing full food security with dignity in their food choices. In this project, funded by SCU’s REAL program and the Center for Food Innovation and Entrepreneurship, we will study the patterns of food insecurity among Santa Clara University’s students and identify best practices to further improve the effectiveness and cultural relevance of support offered bySanta Clara University’s Bronco Food Insecurity Program.  To assess the agency of food choices and imagine creative solutions to secure the human right to food, we also intend to inform this research from the work of civil rights activists of the past and present. That means looking to the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program, the slew of “free fridges” that popped up this summer, mutual aid programs, and more.

The research team will partner with the Bronco Food Insecurity Program, and the Multicultural Center (MCC) to help to understand these issues and develop a list of recommendations that aim to ensure that all Santa Clara University students can achieve food security.  We will also interview staff and faculty at other colleges and universities to understand what they have done to address these issues as well as for guidance on what strategies to avoid. As a final product the team plans to produce a report on the state of food insecurity at the university as well as some action-oriented goals for the university to take steps to produce a more food just campus. 

We  will also assess students’ food sovereignty, as an approach that recognizes student ideas, ethics, and values and uses them to  help generate and assess potential solutions. Food sovereignty posits that students, farmers, and eaters should be able to strongly influence what foods they eat on a day to day basis,  find cultural meaning in their meals, and participate in broader agricultural and food systems that are broadly consistent with their social and ethical values. Students are often prohibited from this kind of food access due to cost or availability of culturally relevant foods. Furthermore, available foods should be produced sustainably and in ways that avoid exploitation of farmers and food workers.  After interviewing students, faculty, and staff, we will analyze how each group views food sovereignty and the contours of potential solutions. 

If you would like to get involved as a participant in  this research project, please do not hesitate email us to sign up for an interview or focus group  at cgentilemontgomery@scu.edu and cbacon@scu.edu  We appreciate any and all input to help identify the best solutions to this complex challenge. Stay up to date with this research project on this blog page! 

By Lisa Kelley and Chris Bacon*

This post builds on last week’s discussion of survey design and implementation, as we focus on the steps we have taken since to ensure that any survey analyses we perform will be robust, transparent and reproducible by others.

Original survey data rarely arrives perfectly “clean.” This is true even when using new survey collection platforms that circumvent the need to manually enter paper-based survey responses. In this case, we used a platform called Qualtrics (there are other software packages, such as Kobo Toolbox, that are open source), which directly transforms recorded survey responses recorded into .csv, .xml, .spss or .tsv format. Even with the use of Qualtrics, however, this year’s household survey data was not always immediately suitable for exploration and analysis. For example, examine the data columns to the left. The column to the far left notes whether or not area is held in basic grains, and the second two columns record the date of 2015’s first corn and/or bean planting. To make these more easily analyzable, we have to first standardize existing dates and determine how we will treat data entries missing a month or day value.

A full data cleaning and wrangling process can include efforts to standardize entries (e.g. correcting mis-spellings), remove or correct obviously errant values (e.g. -2 household members), impute missing values relying on context-specific expertise or available survey data, compute derivative values (e.g. a value for total area land holdings by summing across all reported household land holdings), or manipulate the shape of the data table to facilitate analysis.

The ideal in this process is perfect reproducibility of the data maintaining a raw file of the data exactly as it was recorded (i.e. through survey collection) and performing all cleaning operations through programming scripts that modify and reproduce the database while leaving the raw data untouched. This can quickly become an enormous task. As Hadley Wickham says, summoning Tolstoy on unhappy families: “Tidy datasets are all alike, but every messy dataset is messy in its own way” (from R for Data Science: p. 147).

Below is a description of how we have approached data cleaning and wrangling with household surveys through this project to ensure the accessibility and reproducibility of later analyses.

•  Developing a work flow that meets the data needs of all project partners: The different researchers on our team have comfort with different platforms for data exploration and analysis. For this reason, we needed an approach that produced interpretable and clean data in multiple formats (in our case, R, Stata and Qualtrics, our original survey capture software). To facilitate this, we adopted this approach:
  1. Examine the original raw data file in Qualtrics (or other software program that you are using), remove any practice surveys or duplicates, and download the raw data (thereafter to be untouched). Keep detailed notes on any surveys removed.
  2. Anonymize the data by removing the names of interviewees and replacing them with a coded household ID.
  3. Create a code book with all questions and bief – yet descriptive –  variable names.
  4. Perform all data cleaning through well-commented computer scripts in either R or Stata (in R, the packages “stringdist” and “tidyverse” have been especially helpful).
  5. Utilize the “sjlabelled” package in R to allow for conversion between R and Stata; this makes it relatively to move data back and forth between either analytical platforms.
  6. Re-upload the cleaned database into Qualtrics in a NEW survey database such that other team researchers can use the Qualtrics platform with built-in data analytics without further modification of the underlying data.

•  Cleaning for functionality, not perfection. To manage the time and effort associated with data cleaning we adopted the philosophy: clean for functionality, not perfection. Some data columns either have too few entries to be meaningful or don’t appear analytically interesting or important. For now, and unless they become analytically meaningful for some reason, we won’t clean these columns.
• Thoroughly documenting all changes made to the code or the underlying data in both coding comments and writing. This practice is helpful even for the person writing the code and performing the data cleaning. It addition to including scripted comments that allow non-coders to understand the work flow embedded within the scripts, comments can document the specific rationale for various analytical decisions (i.e. data values to impute, how missing vs. skipped values are coded). Preserving a text version describing this process is also important for sharing data inside and outside the project team.
• Append new columns when/if data values are imputed. With regards to the above data columns on corn and bean plantings, for example, we might clean the original data column to only include values that contain both a stated month and date with all other entries marked as NA. However, we could also impute data by relying on context-specific expertise. For example, if data entries only contain a day value, we could impute that earlier day values ranges (i.e. 10-15) refer to the June month and later day values (i.e. 15-30) refer to the May months. Similarly, if data entries only contain a month value, we could impute the day value from the mean across all complete observations for the reference month. If the variable is important, adding the imputed data as a new column allows us to compare the raw cleaned data and the imputed data to assess whether they tell meaningfully different stories.
•  Append columns that contain data quality flags. When imputing values as above, it is also helpful to create an additional column that contains a quality flag (i.e. an observation has a value of 1 if the original contains both a month and date; a 2 if the original column contained just a date; and a 3 if the original column contained just a month). This practice is particularly important in datasets with a large number of observations; it might be overkill in small n datasets.
• Using checkpoint (or similar) to ensure that the scripts will be reproducible in future years.  Check out the perils of not doing so!
• Version control as working particularly when large collaborative team and thorough documentation of changes made to code or underlying data.  Some people use naming conventions and Google Drive or Dropbox, some have use more sophisticated programs such as those developed by  git hub.
• Grappling with larger issues as a team and with people with context-specific expertise. First it is important to know your data and the context.  If you maintain contact with the field research team, as we do in these long-term participatory processes some data can be cross checked and validated or omitted.  We generally do very little or no data imputation, but in can be done under specific circumstances with detailed notes and justifications.  There are also many questions about the data management (we refer to our data management plans in larger projects, and questions, such as, how much anonymizing to do — do we remove community names and individual ages when preparing data to upload for potentially publicly available databases (e.g., ICPSR), but leave the municipality and district names? The good news is that places like ICPSR and Harvard Dataverse have detailed suggestions about how best to manager this data.

We have two concluding remarks. First, remember to take detailed notes that document all changes made to the original data (this is embedded in the code if you are using R or STATA, but if you are still using a spreadsheet metadata notes are essential to ensure reproducibility).  Finally, we return to the interactive and iterative participatory process with community-partners and the importance of sharing results and anonymous data with those that can use findings to take next steps towards achieving their self defined goals.

*Most of what we have learned in how to do this is from our collaborator  Bill Sundstrom. 

On May 3, 2018, faculty and student research assistants invited the campus community to a dialogue centered around environmental justice in Nicaragua and across the Americas during Santa Clara University’s annual Immigration Week. Testimonials offered by Gustavo Aguirre, the Director of Organizing at the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, faculty research collaborators, and student participants of community-based experiences created a space for reflection, discernment, and avenues of action. After, event attendees had the opportunity to connect with campus and local organizations, such as the Community Agroecology Network and Santa Clara Community Action Program’s (SCCAP) Environmental Action and Worker’s Connection.

The event audience enjoyed viewing the Remi Award winning documentary Ending Seasonal Hunger in Nicaragua, which set the stage for the conversation. Faculty collaborators Christopher Bacon, Iris Stewart-Frey, William Sundstrom, Edwin Maurer, and postdoctoral scholar Lisa Kelley offered reflections on what they learned through building relationships with smallholder communities in Nicaragua and engaging in food and water security research. Student research assistants Chris Esparza and Kimy Grandi Soriano (who also organized and coordinated Immigration Week) opened the student portion of the event with personal stories of what motivates their dedication to the project. Vanessa Shin interviewed participants from the Nicaragua immersion trip, posing the question: which experiences/encounters in Nicaragua have continued to shape you 2.5 years later? The Community Agroecology Network provided coffee from Nicaraguan coffee smallholders.

This event was made possible by funding from the Ignatian Center on Jesuit Education, the Santa Clara Community Action Program, and the SCU Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences, and the National Science Foundation Grant BCS 1539795 continues to support the field research.

I’ve been back in the US for 5 months now but the nostalgia of Ecuador keeps hitting me like the relentless waves of a stormy sea. I’m still processing everything that I experienced, and I’m not sure when and if I’ll stop processing. For some context, I lived in Ecuador for 4 months as part of a program that studies international “development”. I had a subconcentration in “medio ambiente”, or environment,  and chose to take a path different than most other students when it came to choosing a location for our 6-week-long internships. I knew I wanted to study food sovereignty, and knew that if I wanted to study what real food sovereignty is, I needed to immerse myself in an indigenous kichwa community. So that’s what I did. I miss my host parents Manuelito and Laurita everyday. They taught me so much about their lives, their cosmovision, and agriculture as a way of life. Whether it was through this internship, through my classes, through field trips, or through daily lived experiences, I never stopped learning and growing. To help with this all, I’ve decided to organize a short series of beautiful moments from my amazing semester abroad.

Moment 1: The Lake

Adventuring through the sacred lomas by Yaguarcocha, aka blood lagoon, with my host tío Raul and my friend turn family Madison Davis. Having Raulito share with us the history of his land, where his kichwa ancestors defeated and sacrificed the Inca conquistadores and threw their bodies into the lake (hence the name). Taking us on a walk to see the tolas where people were laid to rest many, many years ago. Finding old pieces of ceramic from said tolas. Having Raulito tell us about the celebrations of Inti Raymi that take place on these hills, where people from comunidades all across Caranqui walk/dance to this location to come together and celebrate. Realizing you have the best tour guide in all of Ecuador.

Moment 2: El mercado Amazonas

My host mamá Laurita and I would occasionally come down from the community to buy some needed items from the local market. One day we were waiting for my host dad to come back, and it began to rain. A young woman in her puesto de pollos invited me to sit next to her to seek shelter. We began to talk and she asked me all about my life. “Estás estudiando en la universidad? Guau entonces eres muy inteligente.” “Pues, ojalá!” I responded to her. She asked me about the US, someone had told her that the buildings here are so tall that people never saw the sun. She asked me if that were true, I said no. She asked me about the clothes in America, insisting that they are of the highest quality. I questioned why she thought that, why she and so many other people have been brainwashed to believe that America is the best in everything and it alone is the standard to strive for. Her name is Yessica. She wakes up every morning at 4:30am to kill the chickens and bring them fresh to the market. I’ll always remember the kindness she showed me.

Moment 3: La Misión Scalabriniana

I had the opportunity to visit this wonderful place where a fellow bronco was doing her pasantía. Arelí, my beautiful, intelligent, radiant, and compassionate friend taught me so much (though still just the tip of the iceberg) including: 

• “Immigrants make up 1/10 of Ecuador’s population
• There are at least 200,000 colombianos and a huge new wave of venezolanos today (most come with a tourist visa then stay past their time) which makes them undocumented. Most immigrants work in informal commerce where they are exploited and discriminated for not being Ecuadorian
• Many colombianas and now venezolanas find themselves forced into sex labor
• There are many stereotypes that degrade this population
• The ley orgánica de movilidad humana is unconstitutional trash and does not take into account undocumented migrants
• There is an incredibly high percentage of migrant women who are sexually harassed on
•  their journey from their home country to Ecuador (about 90%)
• Pero, la misión is awesome, they have a refugee house for emergency cases, they have a youth group, they work with public policy and lobby, and they have various groups for women relating to self-care and mental health
• They also offer English, Italian, music, beauty, and massage classes to help integrate the migrants into the workforce
• However because of Trump’s administration cutting funding for international aid, la misión has had to cut their budget and their services
• But despite all the trauma and horrible experiences that these women have to go through in trying to find housing and employment, they are amazing”

This last one I can personally attest to. I was at la misión for ONE DAY and it stole my heart. I had the opportunity to go to one of their events, La Fiesta de los Pueblos, where there was to be many different showcases of people’s different cultures. I thought I was just going to support my super talented friend and watch her perform, but I somehow ended up choreographing and performing in a salsa choke routine with some very amazing and loving kiddos. That moment was one of the highlights of my abroad experience, so gracias Arelí for everything ❤

Moment 4: La Amazonía

We entered the Amazon, we left the Amazon, and I was never the same again. At first we were naive, just happy and excited to be in one of the world’s most beautiful places. Then we were exposed to the heartbreaking realities that exist within the rainforest, especially in relation to the exploitation of petroleum. The state allowed foreign businesses to come in, mainly Texaco (known today as Chevron), especially during the 60s and 70s. Yet the consequences continue to be seen today. Indigenous and campesino populations have been completely disregarded and marginalized. We saw this first hand when Donald (seen in the second photo) took us on a recorrido through the rainforest and showed us the monstrosities caused by Texaco. He told us about the 60,000,000,000 liters of agua de formación (byproduct of petroleum exploitation) intentionally dumped in his people’s drinking rivers. He told us about the many cases of women getting raped by outsider petroleum workers. He told us about the 2800 people in his pueblo who have died of cancer since Texaco came, and the additional 2000 diagnosed. He showed us a pool of petroleum left behind by Texaco, in which 25,000 heads of cattle have died. He showed us the petroleum pools that Texaco allegedly cleaned up after the lawsuit, which they obviously did not do well as they still continue to spew contamination into the surrounding environment. “Chevron tiene 2,640 abogados. Nosotros tenemos 11. Cuatro de ellos trabajan gratis. Los demás son mal pagados.” This trip left us shocked, broken, depressed. Unsure about how we could go on with our normal lives, unsure about what we could possibly do with this information that so few people know of, that almost no one gets to experience first hand like we did. Yet Donald still has hope for a better future, and he wanted us to be optimistic too. “Ahora lo que tienen que hacer es compartir, por favor, compartir todo lo que les enseñé hoy. Para que la gente sepa de nuestra realidad.”

Moment 5: El Intercambio

This was truly one of the most special events I’ve ever been fortunate enough to participate in. On one Wednesday afternoon, my host dad surprised me and my fellow student / (technically) host cousin Madison with a road trip. My host parents, my host aunt and uncle, a host family friend, Madison, and I embarked on a journey of 4 hours (each way) to an extremely isolated indigenous community named La Esperanza. The folks from this community were kichwa agua as opposed to kichwa caranqui like my family. Additionally, they lived in an environment of tierra caliente, and were therefore able to cultivate crops that our community could not. As such, we went there to do an intercambio, or exchange, of goods.

The long ride there took us through the most beautiful parts of Ecuador’s northern mountains and their rich, deep, lively, greenery. It also took us past various microclimates, and various farming practices. At one point we were driving through a huge valley, and my host dad turned to me and said, “¿Ves? Todo este valle donde estamos es caña de azúcar.” We also drove by some smaller plantations, where the brown, dry, lifeless, glyphosate-fumigated plots of land starkly contrasted the lush rainforest right behind it.

This changed when we started getting closer to La Esperanza. Everything in sight was such a lush, deep green that radiated an aura of richness and vitality. Despite the richness in the environment, my host mom explained to me that the folks from this community were actually very poor. Their incredibly isolated location makes it extremely difficult to trade with other indigenous communities, and the nearest town where they could buy food products in times of need was still very far away and an exceptional challenge for those who don’t have a car. As a result, we were welcomed with excitement and open arms by those from La Esperanza. We gave them harina, maíz, chochos, cebolla, habas, zanahorias, and arvejas in exchange for piña, plátanos, naranjillas, arazá, caña, and yuca. Being a part of this exchange completely free from the influence and control of capitalism was an incredible thing to witness. As my host dad once said to me, “Aquí, el dinero es algo diferente para nosotros. Podemos hacer intercambios de comida con otras comunidades, porque la alimentación es lo que tiene valor.”

What do all these moments have in common? Apart from making my heart happy, all of these relate to food sovereignty. Though the connection to Moment 5 may be more clear, perhaps the others have you questioning. Let me explain: Moment 1 speaks to cultural heritage and ancestry, Moment 2 to not only food but also questioning the colonization of the mind through the imposition of western standards, Moment 3 to migration and human rights, Moment 4 to the exploitation of land and people by big, foreign companies. All of these themes are directly related to the food sovereignty movement. FS is so much more than just growing your own food –it is a multi-use tool to address a myriad of social justice issues. But more than anything, it is a way of life. Sumak kawsay, el buen vivir.  

At the beginning of summer, I arrived in Nicaragua for a 2.5 week visit. I was traveling together with my colleagues Ed Maurer and Bill Sundstrom, and two fantastic 2017 ESS graduates: Linsay Tenes and Claire Smoker. Chris Bacon, our project’s lead, had already been in Nicaragua for a few weeks prior and greeted us at the Managua airport.

After a short night near the airport and an introductory meeting with representatives from the National Agricutural University in Managua, we headed to Esteli, in the north of Nicaragua. There we worked side by side with our community partners at Asdenic in Esteli on planning field visits, focus groups, and a workshop to prepare for a large household-level survey on food and water security. We also visited several coffee farming communities north of Esteli, in a landscape of rolling green hills, where the villages blend into the forest. Here we spoke to community leaders and members of water committees, and heard from farmers through focus groups and workshops. We gave presentations on our research progress to date and learned about their experiences on how the rains affect the planning cycle, and the management of the local water resources and water systems.

We also visited wells, springs, pipes, and water tanks and continued our mapping of the water systems and water resources in the area. Water systems in this region draw from springs and creeks in a higher-elevation protected forest region and are mostly gravity-based. The water is delivered in 4-inch pipes to concrete tanks that are about 15 feet on a side and supply several hundred people. The maintenance and management of the system, including such tasks as refilling the chlorination system or cleaning the storage tank are organized by the community. The water from these systems is in short supply, and it is not unusual that water is only available part of the day. All over the villages we visited, community members used streams and ‘ojos de agua’ (low springs) to bathe and wash their laundry. A lot of animals enjoy much freedom walking around the communities and near the streams. In spite of the fact that most of the families in the region have been affected by years of a brutal civil war, there is a strong spirit of community and desire to protect the land, the water, and way of life.

I just returned from six weeks of intense and productive community-based field research with local partners in northern Nicaragua. After training in research ethics and methods, our team of 11 rural Nicaraguan farmers, organic agriculture inspectors, and cooperative development promoters worked with the Santa Clara University faculty and collaborating institutions to complete more than 350 household surveys. Many thanks to colleagues at ASDENIC, PRODECOOP, and the Campesino-a-Campesino for their feedback and support in this effort. We also conducted focus groups, as well as community mapping activities documenting land tenure, water resources, common property, and land use change.

During this time, four collaborators from Santa Clara University (Bill Sundstrom, Iris Stewart-Frey, Ed Maurer, and Lisa Kelley) joined us for 10 days of field research, and two undergraduate students also participated.

You can read more about our collaborations across Santa Clara University here.  Also see an update from the new postdoctoral fellow, and recent UC Berkeley graduate, Lisa Kelley that recently joined the team, and blogged her experience: https://blogs.scu.edu/foodwater/2017/07/21/lisa-kelleys-blog-post-2017/

It’s now time to analyze the data, write, and plan next steps.