Please welcome Leila Pinchot to the staff of TACF. Leila is a Graduate Student at the Yale University Graduate School of Forestry, and will split her time between school and serving as TACF?s New England Regional Science Coordinator.
While she'll be working with State Chapters throughout New England, Connecticut will be her home. I asked Leila to tell us a little about herself, and this is what she sent.
I have always enjoyed being outside in nature. As a little girl I spent summers in eastern Pennsylvania, where my sister and I would camp, fish and hunt for edible plants. In high school my father told my sister and I about blight and showed us some sprouts growing in PA. As many people are, I was drawn to the chestnut story.
Over winter break of my senior year at Oberlin College, I volunteered for Dr. Sandra Anagnostakis at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. The month long internship turned into a summer job, where I learned how to grow, pollinate, and inoculate chestnuts, and to grow chestnut blight and to convert blight fungus with hypovirulence. After working for Dr. Anagnostakis, I helped established an American chestnut orchard at the Milford Experimental Forest in PA.
I am currently a student at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. I am very excited to join the American Chestnut Foundation as the New England regional Science Coordinator.
Feel free to contact me at gro.fca@alieL.
I hope you all get a chance to meet Leila this summer. Chances are, that if you participate in one of the pollinations, you will. My first experience with Leila was her ?bailing me out? of some of the logistics associated with last year?s annual meeting at Yale University. I can?t tell you how delighted I am that she?s accepted the position t
