Vivian Wauters joined UC SAREP as a project scientist on Jan. 1.

In this role, Wauters is working with Sonja Brodt on a project to support co-learning and institutional capacity-building within a multi-organizational network to help accelerate adoption of climate-adaptive and climate-mitigating practices among California farmers.

Activities within this project include strengthening the California Farm Demonstration Network through institutional capacity-building and applied, participatory on-farm research. She will be facilitating a soil health assessment that will support farmer decision-making and establish a baseline for continued investigation of California-specific soil health and resilience indicators. 

Wauters is interested in how we can foster agroecological transitions and transformations, and how the collaboration of multiple forms of knowledge and expertise can build capacity for stewarding multifunctional agricultural systems. 

Prior to joining UC SAREP, she was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Davis. Wauters, who grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills, also has been a vegetable farm worker in Minnesota and California.

She holds a Ph.D. in applied plant sciences–agronomy/agroecology from University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and a master's degree in linguistics from UC Berkeley.

Wauters is based in Davis at the UC ANR building and can be reached at vwauters@ucanr.edu and (530) 240-3527.

This article originally appeared in UC ANR Employee News.