Sreekala G. Baja, Rafael Muñoz-Carpena, and Amy Kaleita were recently honored by ASABE with gold medal awards, among the highest honors bestowed by the organization. The awards were presented at a luncheon ceremony held during the 2022 ASABE Annual International Meeting, in Houston.
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Sreekala G. Bajwa, ASABE Fellow, is the recipient of the 2022 Cyrus Hall McCormick Jerome Increase Case Gold Medal for outstanding contributions in industrial adoption of precision agriculture technologies and agricultural byproduct utilization and ensuing contributions to foundational technologies.
Bajwa is the dean of the College of Agriculture, director of the Montana Agricultural Experiment Station, and vice president for agriculture at Montana State University. She leads the college’s research, teaching, and outreach programs in alignment with the university’s land-grant mission. She is responsible for developing and implementing a shared vision and strategic plan to position the college as a leader in the region. Her recent leadership efforts focus on faculty success through recruiting, onboarding and retention for inclusive excellence, equitable student success, leading through the challenges of the pandemic, establishing a comprehensive precision agriculture program in Montana, and bridging the gap between research and commercialization/adoption through university-industry-government partnerships. She also engages with regional and national organizations on addressing challenges and opportunities facing agricultural colleges and experiment stations.
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The Cyrus Hall McCormick Jerome Increase Case Gold Medal Award is awarded “for exceptional and meritorious engineering achievement in agriculture.”
Rafael Muñoz-Carpena, PE, ASABE Fellow, is the recipient of the 2022 John Deere Gold Medal for outstanding contributions to water quality by developing novel engineering design and modeling tools to mitigate surface runoff pollution with vegetation buffers.
Muñoz-Carpena is a professor of hydrology and water quality in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at the University of Florida. In this role, he teaches courses in integrated environmental systems analysis and modeling, including interactions between hydrological, ecological and human components, and identifying important drivers and uncertainty of these integrated systems. He also teaches research in hydrologic processes including hydrologic field and modeling studies of contaminant fate, and pollution control practices that improve the compatibility of agriculture and other human land uses with the surrounding natural ecosystem.
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The John Deere Gold Medal honors achievement through engineering for improved manipulation, use and conservation of soil-water resource, and that has resulted in applications of a new concept, product, art or science that advanced the development of agriculture.
Amy Kaleita, PE, ASABE Fellow, is the recipient of the 2022 Massey-Ferguson Educational Gold Medal for her dedication to all aspects of undergraduate and graduate student learning.
Kaleita is department chair and professor in agricultural and biosystems engineering at Iowa State University (ISU). She teaches courses and conducts research in land and water resources engineering and management, modeling and data analysis. This also includes numerical methods for agricultural and biosystems engineering students, soil and water conservation for technology students, and advanced soil and water conservation engineering for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. Throughout her career, Kaleita has been devoted to providing high quality education to early career engineers and technologists and to creating a robust research program. Kaleita also conducts research on information technology for precision conservation, remote sensing, hydrologic modeling, precision farming, and advanced analytical methods for understanding the influence of spatiotemporally variable soil and hydrologic properties.
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The Massey-Ferguson Educational Gold Medal honors those whose dedication to the spirit of learning and teaching in the field of agricultural engineering has advanced our agricultural knowledge and practice, and whose efforts serve as an inspiration to others.
ASABE is an international scientific and educational organization dedicated to the advancement of engineering applicable to agricultural, food, and biological systems.