Beth is one of the eight Doctoral Fellow's in the African Food Security and Natural Resource Management Doctoral Training Program. She received her MS. from UC Davis and is a graduate of the UC Santa Cruz Farm and Garden Apprenticeship Program in ecological agriculture. She has worked in Kenya for 15 years and is affiliated with a Kenyan non-governmental organization, the Environmental Action Team (EAT). EAT specializes in community based training and adaptive research aimed at developing Kenyan small-scale farmers capacity to manage their soil fertility and food security problems via the strategic use of organic inputs and improved agronomic management practices.

Beth's dissertation research will examine interactions between organic input management strategies and soilborne disease problems in the densely populated Kenyan highlands, where an increase in soilborne pathogen problems has paralleled the decline in soil fertility on small, intensively cultivated farms. The key soilborne pathogens on these degraded soils are facultative saprophytes that can use fresh plant residues as a food source. This has potentially serious implications for farmers attempting to rehabilitate their soils using residues from cover crop and agroforestry species. Beth's central theses are that (i) there are specific residue management strategies that farmers will be able to employ to help mitigate negative residue/pathogen interactions over the short-term and that (ii) pathogen problems will decrease over the long-term with regular organic input use.