Lisa Flinn, Extension Administrative Assistant, Operations and Staff Support
Lisa Flinn is an administrative assistant at the St. Johnsbury Extension office, and brings 20 years of experience in the administrative assistant field. Prior to joining Extension, Flinn held positions as an administrative assistant with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont for 20 years, Northern Power Systems for four years, Central Vermont Medical Center for five years and Littleton Regional Health Care for three years.
Flinn has worked with children in youth sports programs for 16 years, and held roles as the treasurer and vice president of the Barre Youth Basketball program. Her greater accomplishments are her two children: a son Cameron, who is graduating from Lyndon State College in 2022, and a daughter Colleen, who will graduate from Danville High School in 2022 and plans to attend the University of New Hampshire. In her spare time, Flinn entertains 26 chickens and two dogs at her home in Danville.
Cory Morgan, Animal and Veterinary Sciences Lecturer
Cory Morgan has joined the Department of Animal and Veterinary Sciences as a lecturer. Morgan received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Framingham State University, and a master’s degree in Animals and Public Policy from Tufts University. Early in her career, Morgan worked in animal care, first with nonhuman primates in a medical research setting, and later as a zookeeper. Morgan is a certified veterinary technician and has worked in private practice with small animals, and in the nonprofit sector with service dogs. She has almost a decade of higher education teaching experience.
Morgan has many personal interests and hobbies. She is a certified community herbalist, enjoys growing and learning about plants, and is passionate about the health of honeybees and native pollinators. She recently began a lifelong journey of learning to play the mandolin. Morgan currently resides in central Massachusetts and will work remotely for the semester, but plans to relocate to Vermont during the summer of 2022. She is looking forward to teaching in person in the fall.
Ernest Bove, Extension Northwest Migrant Regional Coordinator, Migrant Education
Ernest (Ernie) Bove Jr. recently joined Extension as the Northwest regional coordinator for the Migrant Education program. Bove comes to Extension from Tetra Tech ARD, an international development consulting firm, where he managed USAID programs aimed at improving governance, economic opportunities, and access to quality public services for communities across Latin America.
Bove is a fluent Spanish speaker and has significant experience in the Latin American and Caribbean region, where he most recently supported USAID programs in Guatemala, El Salvador and Colombia. Prior to working with Tetra Tech, Bove spent three years living in Santiago, Chile where he worked for IBM’s Global Financing team.
Bove is a native Vermonter whose parents are both UVM graduates (Ernest Bove Sr. and Kathleen Reardon Bove , ’76). He is a graduate of Colby College and studied international studies and economics. Bove enjoys international travel, skiing, biking and hiking.
Laura Johnson, Extension Pollinator Support Specialist
Laura Johnson has been hired as Extension’s pollinator support specialist. She will be based in the Berlin Extension office. Johnson has a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from St. Lawrence University and a master’s degree in horticulture from New Mexico State University. She is a certified crop adviser, beekeeper, and holds a Vermont pesticide applicator license.
Johnson is not new to UVM Extension, having started with the Migrant Education program in 2017 before moving to an agronomy outreach role with the Center for Sustainable Agriculture. She is excited to continue her work with Vermont’s exceptional agriculture and farm community, and is eternally grateful for all who have supported her in her career path.
Sardorbek Musayev, Postdoctoral Associate, Extension Programming & Faculty Support
Sardorbek Musayev is a postdoctoral associate and will be working with a precision agriculture and environmental impact of dairy farms project. Musayev will also be involved in a field assessment with the Lake Champlain Basin Conservation Effects Assessment Project (CEAP) to study the propensity of producing runoff and phosphorus loss.
Musayev received his Ph.D. and M.S. in environmental engineering from the University of Connecticut. During his graduate years, he worked with water and food security projects in Africa, specifically in Ethiopia. Musayev studied smallholder farmers effective uptake and dissemination of scientific weather forecast information, to improve their agricultural productivity. He trained local experts to recognize hydro-ecological dimensions of water-food-energy (WFE) security problems, and communicated with water management stakeholders in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. In the past, Musayev worked on several agriculture and water development projects in Central Asia.
Mario Machado, Postdoctoral Associate, Community Development and Applied Economics
Machado’s research sits at the intersection of agroecology and landscape ecology. In particular, he is interested in understanding the ways that policies and programs might improve sustainable agricultural practices on farms in ways that scale up to broader landscapes. This work is generally interdisciplinary, looking at the social, economic and ecological dimensions of agricultural livelihoods, and the various ways these translate into sustainability and resilience at larger spatial scales.
Geographically, Machado’s work has focused on Latin America, in particular Cuba, as well as sub-Saharan Africa. In addition to his research, he is also in the process of starting a small agroecological farm in Franklin, New Hampshire, with a focus on temperate agroforestry and mushroom cultivation.
Machado is an avid freelance writer of both nonfiction and fiction. This work generally focuses on the nexus of society and ecology, science and the humanities, especially in the context of climate change.
Marcelo Vedovatto, Postdoctoral Associate, Animal and Veterinary Sciences
Marcelo Vedovatto holds a B.S. in animal science from Santa Catarina State University (Brazil), and an M.S. and Ph.D. in animal science/ruminant nutrition from Mato Grosso do Sul Federal University (Brazil). He also holds a postdoctoral in ruminant nutrition from the University of Florida.
Vedovatto was an assistant professor at Mato Grosso do Sul State University, where he conducted research evaluating the effects of trace minerals on reproduction of beef cows and on growth, immune response, and physiology of beef calves. In 2022, he joined the ASCI Kraft Lab team as postdoctoral associate, where he works evaluating the effects of nutrition on rumen microbiota diversity and fatty acids composition, and its effects on milk fatty acids composition of dairy cows. His goal is find ways to increase the bioactive fatty acids concentration in milk (mainly branched chain fatty acids) that could prevent or treat metabolic syndrome in humans.
Felipe Machado de Sant’Anna, Postdoctoral Associate, Animal and Veterinary Sciences
Felipe Machado de Sant’Anna is from Brazil, and holds a bachelor’s degree in veterinary medicine, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in animal science from the Veterinary School of the Federal University of Minas Gerais.
De Sant’Anna’s research projects are related to molecular microbiology and microbial ecology. In 2019, he received his Ph.D. with the thesis, “Microbiome of the Minas artisanal cheeses from the Serra do Salitre region, throughout ripening time.” Throughout his career as an undergraduate, de Sant’Anna has been developing experience with probiotics and microbial characterization of animal products.
He was an associate professor lecturing in technology and inspection of products of animal origin from 2020 to 2022. In January 2022, de Sant’Anna began his postdoctoral work at UVM under the supervision of Dr. John Barlow, with a research proposal to investigate resistomes of pathogens present in milk and dairy products, via high-throughput sequencing on U.S. dairy farms.
Hafedh Ben Zaabza, Postdoctoral Associate, Animal and Veterinary Sciences
Hafedh Ben Zaabza was born and raised in Tunisia. After completing a bachelors degree at Sfax, he went on to finish an engineers degree in agriculture science at Carthage University in 2011, a master’s degree in animal breeding and genetics in 2013, and a Ph.D. in quantitative genetics at Carthage University in 2017. He subsequently held his first postdoctoral position at the Natural Resources Institute Finland (LUKE) from 2018 to 2021.
Ben Zaabza’s postdoctoral research focused on developing novel genomic reliability approximation methods, in SNP-BLUP and ssGBLUP models for large dairy cattle evaluation. He started his second postdoctoral fellowship at UVM in 2022. His current research focuses on generating genetic merit predictions using existing data from infrared spectroscopy data of milk components, and on integrating high-throughput phenotyping derived from existing data and available genotyping data. This will enable genomic selection and genome-wide association studies for economically important traits in dairy cattle. His research interests focus on the development of genomic breeding value prediction models for dairy cattle with linear and non-linear models.