Cooperative Extension Specialist Earns Early Career Scientist Award

EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (June 3, 2024) – Biswanath Dari, Ph.D., assistant professor and natural resource specialist for the Cooperative Extension at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, has received the American Society of Agronomy Environmental Quality Section 2023 Inspiring Early Career Scientist Award. The award celebrates his early career and research achievements.

The ASA award recognizes worthy professionals, nominated by their peers or mentors, who have made an outstanding contribution toward sustaining agriculture through environmental quality research, teaching, extension/public service, or industry activity within approximately seven years of completing their terminal degree.

“I was happy to receive the award,” said Dari. “It seemed that within the last 10 years since as a Ph.D. student, my entire research was tailored towards environmental quality. I was surprised but, in a sense, not super surprised.”

Dari was nominated for the award by his previous post-doctoral supervisor Christopher Rogers, Ph.D., a research soil scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. The award was presented during a joint meeting of the ASA, the Crop Science Society of America and the Soil Science Society of America in St. Louis.

“I have been involved with each of these societies since 2011 when I was a graduate student,” said Dari. “Environmental quality is the subject area perfectly aligned with my work, which is soil health, quality and fertility, plant nutrition and crop productions.  My work tries to answer the question, ‘How can I increase the crop yield on the farm while reducing the loss of essential nutrients in the water, so that our water quality is improved, soil quality is maintained, and we can be part of a happy soil-crop-animal-environmental-human health system?’”

Since joining the Cooperative Extension at N.C. A&T in 2021, Dari has specialized in educational strategies and programs to build and adopt climate-smart, resilient, sustainable farm production practices for small-scale, limited-resource and socially disadvantaged audiences.

Before joining the A&T faculty, Dari was an assistant professor at Oregon State University. He worked as a post-doctoral investigator at the University of Idaho in 2017; completed his Ph.D. in soil and water sciences from the University of Florida in 2015; and received his master’s degree in climate change and agricultural meteorology from Punjab Agricultural University, India in 2010.

As an environmental scientist, Dari has taken leadership roles in various research projects to evaluate agricultural and environmental responses to climate change using social, economic, and community-based approaches. He has secured about $1.71 million in extramural funding, has more than 27 peer-reviewed publications and has obtained more than 35 local, regional, national level awards.