Page 26 - Graduate Student Commencement 2020
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  Guest Speakers
Keynote Speaker Minnesota DNR Commissioner Sarah Strommen Appointed by Governor Tim Walz on January 7, 2019
Formerly the DNR’s assistant commissioner, Commissioner Sarah Strommen now oversees a DNR staff of about 2,700 located in St. Paul and around the state, with the mission of working with Minnesotans to conserve and manage the state’s natural resources, providing outdoor recreation opportunities, and providing for commercial uses of natural resources in a way that creates a sustainable quality of life Prior to coming to the DNR in 2015, Strommen served as assistant director at the Board of Water and Soil Resources (BWSR) before becoming acting deputy director She previously served as policy director for Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness and as associate director of the Minnesota Land Trust
Strommen holds a bachelor’s degree from Grinnell College, where she majored in biology and Latin American studies After graduating from college, she used a Fulbright research scholarship to do field work in Costa Rica, and subsequently earned her master’s degree in environmental management from Duke University
She served several terms on the Ramsey city council and was elected mayor in 2012, a position she stepped down from in May 2018 She is an avid outdoors person, spending family weekends fishing, hunting, snowmobiling, camping, and hiking
Student Speaker Deepak Haarith
Deepak Haarith is graduating with a PhD in Plant Pathology He was born
in Chennai, India, and obtained his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Industrial Biotechnology (Bioprocess and Biochemical Engineering) from SASTRA deemed University before coming to the University of Minnesota Deepak’s doctoral dissertation focused on studying a long-term soy-corn rotation to identify biocontrol agents for soybean cyst nematodes (SCN)
He identified the most common fungi associated with SCN that can be cultured in the lab and screened out some with potential for biocontrol both in vitro and in vivo While at UMN, he has served as our college’s student senator and represented the Council of Graduate Students (COGS) in several elected roles He is the outgoing vice president of COGS He is interested
in agriculture, public education and policy, and outreach He has recently accepted a post-doctoral research scientist position at the University of Wisconsin, studying molecular bases of soybean resistance to SCN
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