Students, Staff and Post-Docs

Samantha Simard

Samantha Simard is currently a graduate student at California Polytechnic State University. Having received her Bachelor of Science in Agriculture Science and a minor in Biology from Southern Utah University, Samantha returned to her hometown of San Luis Obispo to pursue a masters degree. As a Master of Science Candidate in Agriculture with a specialization in Plant Protection/Pathology.

Christina Ippoliti

Christina Ippoliti is a Ph.D. candidate in Molecular and Cellular Biology in Dr. Zhongchi Liu’s lab at the University of Maryland – College Park. She is passionate about sustainability; in her work and studies, she hopes to build bridges between molecular plant biology and regenerative agriculture. Her current research projects in the lab focus on understanding fruit and runner development and improving genetic transfection methods in strawberry.

Pooja Tripathi

I am a first year PhD student at the Ohio State University. Before joining Ohio State, I received a master’s degree in Plant Biosciences from South Korea.  I am working on developing controlled environment strategies to condition young plants for optimized propagation behavior in strawberry transplants, supervised by Dr. Kubota. Our focus is to develop greenhouse propagation methodologies for year-round supply of daughter plants.  

Baker D. Aljawasim

Baker D. Aljawasim is a doctoral student at the Hampton Roads Agricultural Research and Extension Center, School of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Virginia Tech University. He holds a M.S. in Plant Pathology from the University of Kentucky. His research is focused on mapping of flower buds, branched crowns and crop yield after exposing strawberry plants to different growing degree days (GDD) in the fall season.

Ian Mellon

Ian Mellon is a Research Technician with Dr. Gina Fernandez developing elite strawberry and caneberry cultivars. He completed his Master’s degree from Cornell University studying plant breeding and plant pathology. His goal is to improve yield, disease resistance, and genetic diversity of North Carolina strawberries utilizing modern molecular techniques.

Calyssa Stevenson

Calyssa Stevenson is a Master’s student in Dr. Gina Fernandez’s lab at NCSU. Her research focuses on evaluating the fruit quality of strawberry runners propagated in controlled environments once transferred to the field. Calyssa received her B.S. in Plant Breeding and Biotechnology in Horticultural Science from NC State.

Moein Moosavi-Nezhad

Moein Moosavi-Nezhad is a Ph.D. student in the Horticultural Sciences department at NC State University, working in the Controlled-Environment Agriculture Lab under Ricardo Hernandez. He started working in CEA in 2016 at the University of Tehran focusing on plant-light interactions in grafted vegetables and finished his master’s in 2019. After graduating, he continued research on light-plant interactions in CEA and joined the Strawberry PIP-CAP SCRI in August 2022.

Ibraheem Olamide Olasupo

Ibraheem has worked as a lecturer at Sule Lamido University, Kafin Hausa (SLUK), and Binyaminu Usman
Polytechnic, Hadejia, both in Nigeria over a cumulative period of six years. He served as Ag Deputy Dean
and Examination Officer of the Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Resources Management at SLUK. He
has published high impact research articles in reputable journals both locally and internationally. He is currently a Post doctoral Research Scholar on the PIP-CAP, investigating various interests
on strawberry production in controlled environments.

Dr. Yue Shan

Dr. Shan graduated with a PhD
from NCSU under the direction
of Dr. Heidi Schweizer. She is now
working to develop CEA strawber-
ry propagation budgets under the
direction of Dr. Daniel Tregeagle.

Kim Heagy

Kim Heagy is the Research Assistant with Dr. Mark Hoffmann’s lab. She assists in field trials, greenhouse trials, and laboratory work for both strawberry and grape research initiatives. I also manage the indoor greenhouse strawberry nursery. 

K. Lizeth Vigil

K. Lizeth Vigil is the PIP-CAP group’s Program Manager. She handles all logistics for the project.

Alexa Artis

Alexa is part of the communications team for the project. She manages the website and creates the newsletters, brochures, videos, and articles.

Emma Volk

Emma was a Research Assistant in the Dr. Mark Hoffmann Lab. She did lead the charge to develop the first greenhouse nursery in 2021.This nursery provided started plants for many experiments and labs for almost one year. The current NCSU greenhouse nursery was established under the care of NCSU Post-Doc Dr.Ibraheem Olasupo.

Rocco Schiavone

Sam Humphrey

Sam was the first graduate student
on the project. Samson worked in
Dr. Ricardo Hernandez’s lab and
graduated with an MS in 2024.
Besides investigating the impact of
CO2 concentrations on runner de-
velopment, he also led the charge
on developing a label system for
runners. This system is currently
deployed in a phenotyping study
at NCSU. Sam won several awards
for best oral presentations, and his
work has been published.

Lian Durón

Lian graduated with an MS from Dr.Celina Gomez lab within the department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Purdue University. Her research focused on developing environmental strategies to maintain quality during long-term storage of strawberry rooted and unrooted tips.

Jung Hoon Han

Dr. Jung Hoon Han graduated with a PhD from Dr. Daniel Tregeagle. He analyzed interviews that were hold with California strawberry nurseries. Dr. Han was also part of the California industry in 2022.

Dr. Erin Yafuso

Erin is a Plant Scientist with Smithers-Oasis horticulture department. They are known for propagation root-cubes or wedges. Dr. Yasufo was a Post-Doctoral researcher with Dr. Jennifer Boldt at the USDA-ARS. She investigated the impact of Nitrogen concentrations on strawberry physiology. Her work has been published in HortScience in 2025.

Dr. Xi Luo

Dr. Lou was a Post-Doctoral researcher in Dr. Zhongchi Lou’s lab at University of Maryland. She developed melting assays for an array of genes involved in runnering and flowering along the octoploid, ground work that is used in Dr. Caren Cheng’s lab today. Dr. Lou is today a Professor at Shandong Agriculture University in Tai’an, China.