Advancing AGNR’s Strategic Initiatives Fearlessly Forward Grants 2025

Dr. Yuanyuan (Rose) Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Science will receive $100,000 to lead a project that will advance the strategic initiatives One Health: Improve Human, Animal, and Environmental Health, and Establish a Healthy Food System and Ensure Global Food and Nutrition.

Her project titled: “Environmental and Health Benefits of Microgreen Cultivation and Consumption: A Pilot Study Linking Lab, Farmers, and Consumers,” aims to explore the feasibility of identifying optimal cultivation practices to enhance the health-benefits of microgreens. Li will also integrate her findings with extension and education, surveying farmers and consumers to identify barriers to broadening the microgreen market and developing outreach materials to help disseminate the team’s research findings.

"I’m honored to receive this award and excited for the opportunity to lead this research,” Li said. “By investigating how microgreens may help reduce age-related health conditions in laboratory animals, and understanding farmer and consumer perspectives, our team is excited to bridge scientific discovery with real-world application. If successful, this work could not only advance nutritional science but also support wider adoption of microgreens as a sustainable and health-promoting food source."

Li and her team intend to grow microgreens including kale, Brussels sprouts and watercress in environmentally controlled chambers to test the effects of different lighting treatments on their potential to produce a compound with powerful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties that are believed to promote health. Then the team will investigate whether feeding mice with microgreens grown to contain the optimal amount of this compound can reduce age-related health conditions.

Next, the team will conduct farmer surveys to gauge grower willingness to cultivate antioxidant enhanced microgreens and consumer studies to understand their perceptions of microgreens and barriers to increasing microgreen consumption.

Ultimately, these efforts have the potential to enhance nutrition quality, reduce the risk of age-related chronic diseases in health vulnerable populations, and support the expansion of microgreen agriculture.

In addition to Li, the team consists of the following AGNR faculty:
Department of Food and Nutritional Science: Hee-Jung Song, Liangli Yu

University of Maryland Extension: Xuan Wei

Dr. Becky Epanchin-Niell, an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics will receive $100,000 to lead a project that will contribute to two initiatives: Ensuring Healthy Watersheds and the Chesapeake Bay, and Advancing innovative, Profitable, and Sustainable agricultural production systems.

The project titled: “Options for Adapting to Rising Seas (OARS): Improving decision-making on salt-intruded farms” aims to help coastal farmers make informed decisions about their land management that will promote environmental health and resilience to coastal climate change, while maintaining economic viability and agricultural livelihoods.

“We are thrilled to receive this funding, because it enables us to build on our prior research to provide coastal farmers and landowners with much-needed tools and resources to better navigate pressing challenges caused by sea level rise and salt water intrusion."

With rising sea level, Maryland’s Eastern Shore is losing valuable agricultural land to saltwater intrusion, and farmers and landowners are urgently seeking information and resources to help them understand how to best manage their lands. The OARS project team will develop the needed resources and make them available online and in workshops to help farmers access this information.

The team will develop a database that compares state, federal, and non-governmental organization incentive programs available to coastal farm lands and analyze their benefits and costs, barriers to adoption, and applicability to lands affected by saltwater intrusion. Conservation incentive programs often are not designed for application in these transitional lands, so there is particular need for understanding the constraints and opportunities of these programs in coastal areas.

The project will synthesize and build on existing AGNR research on saltwater intrusion in Maryland, and develop Extension factsheets and materials for a variety of audiences including farmers and landowners, educators, program administrators, and program outreach professionals. The researchers will also develop a webpage for the UMD Extension site to house OARS project outcomes and serve as a clearinghouse for information including program summaries, comparison matrices, and other saltwater intrusion resources.

In addition to Epanchin-Niell, the team consists of the following faculty:

Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture: Kate Tully and Colby Sivert

Ms. Jennifer Gunnulfsen, a lecturer in the Department of Environmental Science and Technology will receive $14,750 to enhance and expand the introductory undergraduate course ENST101 - Ecological Discovery and Natural Solutions, from a 1-credit seminar into a 4-credit lecture and lab that provides experiential learning in all five AGNR Strategic Initiatives, with a special focus on Ensuring Healthy Watersheds and the Chesapeake Bay, Optimizing Urban Environments through Design, Green Technology, and Community Engagement, and One Health: Improving Human, Animal, and Environmental Health.

The revised course will be named: Field Methods in Environmental Science

"I am thrilled about the opportunity this grant from AGNR provides to our students to learn in a more experiential way,” Gunnulfsen said. “I think field based trips and laboratory work - essentially students leaving the classroom and perhaps getting their hands a little bit dirty - are incredibly engaging, impactful, and effective methods of understanding and appreciating the critical connection between human activity and our local and regional ecosystems. Undergraduate students taking this course will be exposed to all of the exciting and important research and teaching being done across the ENST Department as they relate to our Strategic Initiatives."

The current course content, weekly presentations and lab tours by departmental faculty on the wide variety of research being conducted in ENST, will be retained, and the new course will include field and laboratory research activities that allow students to delve hands-on into potential solutions to current environmental challenges. In addition to seminars by regional professionals from Federal and State Agencies, consulting firms, and environmental advocacy organizations on career opportunities, the course will take advantage of a wide variety of local and regional opportunities to explore environmental science and technology in action. Field trips will vary with each class, but may include campus offerings such as paint branch stream and the aquaponics greenhouse as well as regional offerings like boat trips to study water quality and human influence on wetland and estuarine environments on the Chesapeake Bay and Anacostia watershed, trips to Baltimore Harbor and D.C.’s Shaw/U Street area to learn about urban greenspaces and environmental justice, and Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant–the largest advanced wastewater treatment plant in the world—to learn how waste is managed.

In addition to Gunnulfsen, the team consists of the following faculty:

Department of Environmental Science and Technology: Jennifer Mullinax and Lance Yonkos.