Alumni News

UH is launching an SE (Student Employee) COVID-19 Relief initiative to keep students working at worksites in need. This will involve sponsor employers who have no work available for their current student employees but are willing to continue paying for them to work at a host site, and host employers who have work for students to do and can be responsible for supervising them (including online).

Congratulations to CTAHR alumnus and former faculty member James Leary and his co-authors! Their scientific paper, “Interpreting Life-History Traits of Miconia through Management over Space and Time in the East Maui Watershed, Hawaii,” recently won the 2019 Outstanding Paper, Invasive Plant Science and Management award from the Weed Science Society of America.

UH Mānoa Facilities is asking for donations of masks for its 300 employees, all of whom are still at work on campus keeping the buildings and grounds safe, sanitary, and operational. They include the janitors, the groundskeepers, the repair people, those who pick up the trash, all those who do the often-unnoticed but utterly crucial work that allows the rest of the University to do theirs.

As the world copes with the pandemic, it becomes more and more important for all of us to promote plant health, especially in Hawaiʻi and other geographically isolated Pacific Islands that currently import more than 80% of our food. Hawai'i is also home to almost 1,400 native plant species, 90% of which grow only here.

We must use all scientific tools at our disposal, including fast and accurate testing and more effective treatments, to shorten the course of the epidemic and lessen its devastating effects on human life and the economy, MBBE professor David Christopher argues in a recent Star-Advertiser editorial.