This month’s spotlight features Ermias Kebreab, Associate Dean in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and a Professor of Animal Science at UC Davis. Learn more about Ermias’s successful career in academia and his work in sustainable agriculture and its impact on climate change.
Please briefly explain some of your responsibilities in your current career role.
I serve as Associate Dean in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. My role is to oversee the colleges global engagement, making sure faculty in the college have opportunities to work internationally. I also oversee agreements signed by our college and institutions worldwide. I oversee training of students and professionals coming to UC Davis from all over the world on topics related to agriculture and environmental science. I am also a Professor of Animal Science. In this capacity, I lead a lab with 6 post-doctoral fellows, 4 PhD students, 2 visiting professors and several undergraduate interns.
How did you decide that this was the right career path for you?
I have always been interested in research. Back in Asmara, an Italian professor gave me my first research project, which I enjoyed a lot. He encouraged me to continue my research. Also, while in Asmara, I remember teaching biology to undergraduate students and quite enjoying it. So, a career in academia seemed to be the best career path as it combines teaching with research.
What led you to be interested in cows?
My first interaction with cows was looking after them when relatives come to visit from rural areas. Always wondered how a cow eating just grass can give highly nutritious food such as milk, which can be converted to cheese and butter. I wanted to understand more how they worked and was interested in increasing the amount of milk production so that it is widely available. I pursued biology/chemistry while at Asmara University and then went to animal science when I moved abroad.
Why is sustainable agriculture an important issue that we should care more about and pay attention to?
As much as livestock provides nutritious food to humans, it also has an environmental impact. As we all know, climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time and our food production contributes a fifth to a quarter of all emissions that impact climate change. So, we must do something about it if we are going to limit the expected increases in temperature. Already we are seeing the impact of climate change with droughts in some areas such as East Africa and floods in places like Pakistan and South Asia. Therefore, it is critical that we come up with solutions to reduce the impact of not only livestock but our food system on the climate.
What is the impact you hope your work will make on our world?
My lab focusses on finding solutions to reduce greenhouse gases that have huge impact on climate change. In particular, methane, a potent greenhouse gas mostly comes from ruminant animals such as cows, sheep and goats so we have been focusing on that issue. I hope that through our work we see a drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade or so and contributing to global pledge of reducing methane emissions by 30% by 2030. Some of the work we are conducting at the moment will certainly achieve that goal.
What are the qualities that make a great researcher/scientist?
To be a scientist, one needs to be curious and try to understand why things happen the way they do. A good scientist does not give up easily as problems worth solving are not easy by nature so there is going to be a lot of failures and successes. These days researchers spend a lot of their time trying to get funding for their programs, some with 10% or less chance of success. That can take away time from thinking, reading, and conducting experiments so tenacity is important.
What are the most rewarding and challenging aspects of your career?
One of the most rewarding aspects of working in academics is watching students develop over time. When students come up to me at the end of the course and tell me how much they enjoyed the material covered, and some even completely changed their views on certain things, that is very rewarding. Graduation day feels like a payback for all the hard work during the year. For graduate students watching them grow from shy first year to very confident scientist when they earn their MS or PhD degrees is extremely rewarding. Seeing stakeholders, such as farmers or policy makers, use the end-product of our research is very rewarding and motivates me to do more. The challenges include finding enough time to do all the interesting things one wants to do. Work-life balance could be very challenging for an academic.
You’re currently a Professor at UC Davis; what advice would you offer students who want to pursue a career in science like you?
If students want a career in academia, they should start thinking about where they can get experience in teaching and research. There are a lot of opportunities for students to join a lab and be involved in research while in undergrad. My lab usually takes in about 30 undergraduate students for research every year and there are a lot of other labs that do the same. So, I recommend that you find out what interests you and contact professors to work in their lab as an intern. There are also volunteer teaching opportunities that students can pursue.
To date, what is your greatest professional accomplishment?
I would say the number of undergraduate and graduate students that I worked with who completed their degrees and launched successful careers is an accomplishment I am proud of. A few of my former students are employed in prestigious universities, start-up companies or more established ones all over the world. Every time I get asked to give a talk such as TED talk, I feel that it is an accomplishment that people want to hear about your work.
What do you do for fun outside your hard work and efforts toward building your career? Hobbies?
I used to be a long-distance runner but after repeated injuries I am now an avid Yoga practitioner. For someone with little spare time hot Yoga is a great workout and keeps me in shape!