She studied why people trust, now comes the test
Karissa Palmer ’23 ’26 takes doctorate and passion for science communications to Mason County
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Karissa Palmer ’23 ’26 did not grow up on a farm, but she grew up on farm stories.
Chief among them: her grandmother’s account of the family dairy in Wisconsin, one of the first in the area to install automatic milking equipment. Decades later, as a doctoral student in the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Palmer studied a version of the same question that story raised: What makes people trust something new enough to change what they do?
That question is about to follow her past her dissertation. Palmer is arriving in Mason County as a highly credentialed researcher stepping into a small, tight-knit community, and earning that community’s trust is its own version of the question she just spent years studying.
It is also, in her mind, the whole point. This is a chance to put her research directly to work improving people’s lives, in a role that bridges the science she built her career on with the outreach she has always wanted to do.
Palmer finished her doctorate in May. In June, she started as a family and community health agent with Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service in Mason County. It is the latest step for a first-generation college student who once found research intimidating, then won four university and college awards in her final year, and who describes her new role in AgriLife Extension as the work she always wanted to do.
From “imposter” to researcher
Palmer enrolled at the University of Florida to study agricultural education and communications with a minor in leadership, with no plan to become a researcher. As a first-generation student, she assumed research was for someone else.
“I felt a bit like an imposter,” she said. “That seemed like it was something for students who came from a family with an academic background, not me.”
A mentor helped change that mindset. Megan Cantrell, Ph.D., a former Florida FFA state officer Palmer knew from her own FFA and 4-H years, guided her through a first project on how women in the Florida Farm Bureau defined leadership.
Palmer also worked at the university’s Center for Public Issues Education in Agriculture and Natural Resources, turning consumer research into videos and infographics during the COVID-19 pandemic. This turned out to be early practice at the skill that would define her career: helping complicated information land with an audience.
That work brought her to Aggieland for a master’s under Robert Strong, Ph.D., in the Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communications. She studied rural mental health after natural disasters, and, in her thesis, women’s leadership and food-waste behavior. A friendship in that program connected her to Holli Leggette, Ph.D., who recruited her into the doctoral program.
Palmer had a standing job offer from the American Farm Bureau at the time and chose the doctorate instead. “I just really enjoy science communications,” she said, and Texas A&M was where she could train for it.
The dissertation: What a label is really saying
Working with Leggette and agricultural economist Oral Capps, Ph.D., Palmer built her dissertation around a question with direct stakes for the dairy industry: How does the wording on a label change what someone buys?
I have an opportunity to connect my doctoral degree and love of science communications to the people of Mason County. I plan to do that as much as possible.”
– Karissa Palmer '23 '26
Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service
She designed mock milk labels and ran a randomized controlled trial testing messages about nutrition, production and science on both dairy-milk and plant-based-milk with shoppers. Dairy consumers responded strongly to the nutrition and production messaging. Plant-based consumers, already settled in their reasons for the choice, moved less.
A second part tested something most shoppers never consider: Whole milk is only about 3.25% milk fat, a fact the word “whole” does not convey. Relabeled with the technical figure alone, the product lost shoppers, who reached for what they recognized. But a hybrid label — the familiar word plus the honest detail — held their trust.
The timing is not incidental. The federal Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act has put milk labeling and school nutrition back in the national conversation, and Palmer’s data speaks directly to how consumers respond.
In February, she presented preliminary findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference, the first in her department’s history to do so. The work was funded by the Texas A&M AgriLife Institute for Advancing Health Through Agriculture, IHA.
A year that validated the work
In her final year at Texas A&M, Palmer won four awards, including the Association of Former Students Distinguished Graduate Student Award — one of five recipients university-wide and the only one from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The other awards were the CIRTL Bednarz Award, the IHA Best Poster Award and the ALEC Outstanding Graduate Dissertation Award.
The recognition gave the once-reluctant researcher a reason to stop and take stock. She had told herself that if the awards came, she would let herself feel proud, a pause a doctoral program rarely leaves room for.
“It validated that the work I am doing is good,” she said, “and that other people see it that way, too.”
That validation is part of what is carrying her into a role she didn’t necessarily expect. Rural America is in the middle of a well-documented mental and physical health crisis, and as AgriLife Extension’s family and community health agent in Mason County, Palmer will work directly on the front line in the classrooms, kitchens and clinics where that crisis actually plays out. For a student who once assumed research belonged to someone else, Mason County is the place where that research will meet the people it was meant for.
Choosing where the science lands
A postdoctoral position was available to Palmer, and it’s a path many of her peers take. She chose the AgriLife Extension position because it put her closest to the part of the work she cared about most — people. A family and community health agent does much of what a science communicator does: translating research on chronic illness, nutrition and mental health into terms a community, families or individuals can act on.
Transform your future
Discover how a degree in agricultural leadership, education and communications could shape your story like it did for Karissa Palmer '23 '26.
“Never say never,” Palmer said of academia. “But this feels right, right now.”
In Mason County, she will build programming around local priorities — cooking classes, walking programs and youth education in nutrition and mental health education — and work closely with one of the state’s oldest rural health clinics.
It is hands-on and face-to-face work, which does not mean leaving research behind. If anything, it puts her in position to gather her own data as she goes, watching in real time which messages and programs actually change behavior in a community she’s now part of. Leggette already has projects lined up to keep Palmer’s research talents involved.
“I’ll always have a hand in that space,” Palmer said. “I have an opportunity to connect my doctoral degree and love of science communications to the people of Mason County. I plan to do that as much as possible.”
Teaching, research and extension are one connected mission at Texas A&M AgriLife, and Palmer has now moved through all three: taught as a student, trained as a researcher and now working where that knowledge reaches the people who need it.
