Being a graduate student away from a university can stink but in a good way

BEAUMONT — The whiff of stink bugs was expected.

Walking through farm fields in southeast Texas, an entomologist mainly uses vision to spot insects and relies on years of education and field experience to mentally catalog which are good bugs and which will sicken a farmer’s crop into devastation.

But stink bugs are different. They, well, stink. And, there are lots of different kinds of stink bugs. Some don’t harm plants. Some do. But they all stink.

So Dr. Mo Way followed not just the obvious odor but his considerable hunches after noticing a different stink bug appearing in several soybean fields near the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center in Beaumont where he’s an entomologist.

And Way knew what to do. He pointed a graduate student toward the insect – the redbanded stink bug – to determine if a bigger problem was at hand.

“Redbanded stink bug is an invasive species on soybeans,”  Way said. “It’s the most damaging species on soybeans in our area now and perhaps across the southern U.S., and yet we didn’t know much about it.”

Suhas Vyavhare, was a new doctoral graduate student at the time assigned to the Beaumont research facility after recently completing a master’s in entomology at West Texas A&M University in Canyon. For Vyavhare, working toward a doctorate from the soybean fields of southeast Texas rather than a classroom on a university campus was the fulfillment of a dream he’d had since growing up on a farm in India.

“I was always curious about agriculture and knew I wanted to be in that area for my career. I was good at identifying insects in college, so I guess that is how I was led to entomology,” said Vyavhare, who recently completed his doctorate and now is a post-doctoral researcher at the center.

In the case of the redbanded stink bug, Vyavhare scanned the world to find out what was known about the insect. After gathering biological information from experts in various countries and studying the insect’s life in southeast Texas soybean fields, he developed a pest management program and published several scholarly articles about the insect.

“He found that the redbanded stink bug was responsible for delayed maturity and flat pod syndromes in soybean fields,” Way said. “We didn’t know the cause. We thought it might be stink bugs, but he pinned it down. And he also found out what stage of soybeans is most susceptible.”

“He was able to do things I can’t do because often I am ‘putting out fires,’” Way said of Vyavhare. “When a farmer calls me needing to know what to do about a problem in the field, I have to redirect my attention to try to answer those questions. So graduate students and postdocs can really help researchers like me do long-range research that’s really important.”

His work, while helpful for soybean producers and ultimately for consumers of the multitude of soy-based products, is but one example of the efforts of graduate students stationed at remote AgriLife Research locations around the state. In all, the 13 sites will have at least 100 graduate students working on projects this fall.

Researchers agree that having graduate students such as Vyavhare is a boon for science.

“While graduate students take extra mentoring time, I believe these students are helpful to principle investigators in conducting and broadening their research efforts,” said Dr. Don Cawthon, resident director of the AgriLife Research & Extension Center in Stephenville where about 14 graduate students will be working this fall.

The Stephenville center cooperates with Tarleton State University to land graduate students for research projects. They even have adapted part of their facility to include living quarters for visits by those not living in the area, according to Dr. Jim Muir, an AgriLife Research forages scientist at Stephenville who works closely with many of the students.

While housing graduate students during stints at off-campus research facilities can be a challenge, a solution for that issue reaps benefits for the student and faculty, said Dr. Jamie L. Foster, AgriLife Research forage agronomist in Beeville, part of the AgriLife Research and Extension Center in Corpus Christi.

“Any scientist will tell you that graduate students are crucial to completing research projects,” Foster said.

At both the Corpus Christi center and the AgriLife Research and Extension Center in Weslaco, resident director Dr. Juan Landivar said, graduate students “bring so much life and energy to our centers and are key components of our research.”

Landivar said faculty at Corpus Christi this fall will employ 26 master’s and nine doctoral students while researchers in Weslaco will be assisted by six master’s and 14 doctoral students.

Graduate students also benefit greatly from such positions in field research, officials said.

“In many ways, some of the AgriLife Research and Extension Centers are ‘melting pots’ because they bring together in one location faculty and students from Texas A&M, our sister universities and our affiliated agencies,” said Dr. David Reed, Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences associate dean for graduate programs and faculty development in College Station. “This yields a very high impact educational experience for the student and fosters faculty collaborations.”

Vyavhare agreed.

“The off-campus centers play a huge role in a graduate student’s life when you talk about the applied sciences such as entomology or agriculture,” Vyavhare said. “It provides the opportunity to be in the real field. You get the opportunity to see how things are working in the real environment as opposed to just looking at something in a lab.

“You also get to interact with the farmers and learn their practices and you can compare your technical knowledge with the actual application in the field,” he said. “And you get to know crop consultants and county AgriLife Extension agents and learn from them about situations in the real world. You learn to interact with different people – with a scientist and a farmer we may use different terms.”

For Vyavhare’s aspirations, the AgriLife Research center at Beaumont is a vital stepping stone.

 “In many developing countries, farmers don’t have access to information technology, and I would like to work in that area to take the information from the laboratory out to the field in the real world,” he said. “I would like to contribute in that area at the global level in the future.”