0:00  
Jim: Welcome back to the Plantopia podcast, the plant health podcast produced by the American Phytopathological Society. I'm your host, Jim Bradeen, professor of plant pathology and Associate Vice President for strategy at Colorado State University. And today, I'm really excited to have a conversation with Dr. Sara Garcia Figuera. Sara received her PhD in plant pathology from UC Davis last year in 2021. And her graduate research focused on the management of Huanglongbing or HLB, of citrus. And her research leverages some tools and approaches that are unfamiliar to me and I suspect unfamiliar to many plant pathologist. Her research really extends beyond the classic disease triangle that describes the role of the host plant, the pathogen and the environment in plant disease development, to include factors of human behavior and social science in achieving effective plant disease management. And today, Sara is a consultant providing technical support and conducting policy analyses for agri food clients in Europe and in the US. And you can find Sara on Twitter at sarafiguera. That s-a-r -a-f-i-g-u-e-r-a. Sara, thank you so much for being with us today.

1:35  
Sara: Thank you, Jim. It's a pleasure to be part of this podcast series. And I'm very happy to contribute.

1:43  
Jim: Excellent. I'm very excited to learn more about your your work and your approaches. And I wanted to start our conversation today. Talking a little bit about your, your career path, your academic path. What degrees have you earned? And more importantly, how did you end up in this field of plant pathology?

2:06  
Sara: Thanks. Yeah, that's always an interesting question to ask a plant pathologist

2:14  
Jim: We all have such a different journey into the field. I'm fascinated by that.

2:18  
Sara: Yeah, so I studied for my undergraduate degree, agricultural engineering in Spain, at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, so the main engineering school in Madrid. And I had a really excellent professor of plant pathology during my degree, who's a known virologist
 Fernando Garcia-Arenal. And when I finished the course that he was teaching, which was like the typical introduction to plant pathology. I really liked the subject. And he offered me to work on his lab the following year, just as an as the usual undergraduate assistant. And, and that's how I started to get into the field. In the beginning, of course, I was doing more of the usual mechanical, helping and setting up trials doing analysis. But after that, I did my undergraduate research project with him. And and I thought it was a really fascinating field, because there was the basic biology aspect, but also trying to have an impact on society to improve food security, to reduce crop losses due to diseases. So that kind of that undergraduate experience kind of marked the rest of my career. And I worked for two years in the industry after that, for a company in Spain that sold microbial plant biostimulants. And then I decided that I wanted to get a graduate degree. And that's when I applied for UC Davis and I got there in 2016, into the plant pathology program.

4:06  
Jim: That's really fascinating. I wasn't aware of that you've had industry experience as well, your academic path, in those experiences certainly shape our interests, right plant pathology. So many of us think of it as a discovery field. We need those those research experiences or those interactions to really spark that. That interest. You're actually a native of Spain. Is that correct? You grew up in Spain? Yeah. And you're speaking to us today from outside of Madrid.

4:35  
Sara: Yeah, so I was born in Madrid. Once I came back from the US, I, I moved to a city north of Madrid, like two hours north. So I'm back home, in a sense, not exactly, but almost.

4:52  
Jim: Wonderful. So you've been a plant pathologist on at least two different continents. In California and in Spain. And certainly you're familiar with disease problems throughout Europe as well as the US. Can you comment a little bit on the similarities and the differences that you see.

5:10  
Sara: So for me, that was one of the most shocking things when I moved to California, because I have never been there before. And I realized that the climate has a lot to do with how the landscape is set. So when I remember the first morning at Davis, when I biked around campus, I realized that I knew not the exact same plant species, but very similar, like similar family similar general, that the landscape kind of looked familiar, more familiar than I thought. So some of the in the case of California, it's probably easier for a plant pathologist from Spain to relate to some of the crops and some of the most common diseases. Of course, there are diseases that are different, but the main crops are more or less the same. We have a lot of vineyards, vegetable crops, those are relatable.

6:08  
Jim: That's great. Now, my question was shaped in part by by my own recent experiences, I moved from the Upper Midwest of the US, Michigan, Wisconsin, most recently Minnesota, where, where water is pretty plentiful, and fungal diseases predominate. And now I live in Colorado, which is much drier and viral diseases really, are the bigger challenges here. So it is interesting to hear the similarities between Spain and California. But I am reminded again of that disease triangle, that environment really does shape so much of what we do see in plant pathology, yeah, well, well, while we're talking about Spain versus in comparison to California, could you reflect a little bit on what it was like to experience the the US graduate system, graduate school system,

7:02  
Sara: It's, it's really different from the way graduate programs are in in Spain, and actually most of Europe. That wasn't something that I knew before, before I joined the program at UC Davis. In Europe, you don't have that concept of a graduate program, you usually join a research group, and you start your dissertation, right as you start. So you usually join a project that was already going on, or you apply to for funding to start a new project. But you start research from the beginning. And you usually are helped by the PI of course, and some other people in the lab. But you don't have that part of the experience, that of the program that you haven't in the US where you start having courses with a cohort of people that are going through the same experiences that you're going. So I think in the end, I really liked the US system, I think it gives you a really broad training in plant pathology, or at least at least the way the program was at UC Davis, because you don't only become an expert in the crop and the disease that you are doing your research on. But you also learn about all these other diseases, aspects from molecular plant microbe interactions, all the way to epidemiology. And you get a bit of training in all that so that you're more of a what we used to call in the program, a well rounded plant pathologist. At the same time, you have to, you have to know that you're probably going to invest more time more years in getting your your PhD degree than you would in Europe. So there are pros and cons. But I think it's it's a really different approach. And also, maybe to add, for me from a personal perspective, going having a cohort and having a group of people that started the program at the same time as you are maybe one year before one year after, but people who are going through the same courses and the same experiences that you are, it makes the entire graduate school experience a bit easier, because you're part of a team and you're getting help not only from your lab, but also from other labs.

9:24  
Jim: And as somebody who's recently gone through graduate school, what advice do you have for selecting a graduate program or a graduate mentor?

9:36  
Sara: I think sometimes it's more important to choose the mentor than the program. From my experience, I think it's really important to be working with with with a professor that you get along with and that you can you know you can worked with. So paying attention to the research group that you're joining, what were their last papers? What are their current research projects? How big is the lab? Does the PI tend to be hands on? Or hands off? And what do you feel more comfortable with? What is the the word structure? Do you usually meet very often do you? Does that person prefer to meet on a on a neat case by case basis, those types of things are sometimes more important than than what the program is. Because at least from from my perspective, most of the graduate programs in plant pathology at universities in the US are excellent. And all of them can give you really good training. But in the end, you're going to spend most of your time researching and working on a project. So it's really important that the person that you're working with, that you're compatible with that person and that you get along well.

11:04  
Jim: And your graduate advisor was Neil McRoberts, that correct. And Neil recently contacted me and promised that I was in for a treat and having this conversation with you. So it seems as though you had a really great relationship with your your graduate advisor. And I think that's reflected in your research as well.

11:24  
Sara: Yeah, I remember the first, the first time I interviewed with Neil, to be honest, like I had read his his last publications, and I wasn't completely understanding everything on them. But kind of the, the ideas that he had for the lab and the way he saw his contribution to plant pathology, I really related to that, and, and we had a conversation, that's another thing that I would recommend, like trying to reach out and and speak with the person that that that you want to work with. Because you sometimes get these intuitions or instant feelings that things are probably going to go well. So that was what happened. Yeah.

12:05  
Jim: Yeah, that's great advice. And when you were working in, in Neil's lab at UC Davis, your, your UC Davis colleagues referred to your, your lab as a dry lab. What, what does that mean? And? And what was that like for you? 

12:27  
Sara: Yeah. So we were called the DRI lab, because literally, like, if you went up to our lab on the fifth floor at the Department of Pathology at UC Davis, it was an office. Like we only had chairs, tables, and people working on computers all day long. So that was one of the first things that that Neil told me like, the thing you need to know if you're joining this lab is that you're never going to touch like a pipette. Or anything related that people usually think about when they think about a lab. So they came up with this term, like, oh, yeah, no, you're a dry lab. And it was sometimes a bit weird, because we were the only lab at the time that only did computer work. So most of my my friends were either in a wet lab, or in the field. And we were kind of these people in the middle that just brought their computer everywhere they went.

13:30  
Jim: And I imagine that the lab safety protocols, what what not to wear in particular shorts or sandals probably didn't apply.

13:41  
Sara: Yeah, that was something that that my colleagues used to say like, but you can wear anything you want. We can't, although it was freezing, so you better like clothes.

13:54  
Jim: So you, at least part of your graduate program happens during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and in particular, during the lockdown. How did that impact your your development in your research?

14:13  
Sara: Actually, so by the time COVID started in California, I was living in Riverside, because I moved. On the third year of my program, I moved down from David from UC Davis to UC Riverside because of personal reasons. And because I was working with a professor there that was part of my PhD committee. And it was also a way of being closer to the part of the citrus industry in the state. So by the time COVID came, I was working in a in an office where they had saved me a spot at UC Riverside in the School of Public Policy. And as most people probably I was told on a Saturday morning like come to the building You need to pick up your stuff because we're closing the university down and, and you're gonna have to move everything home. So I set up my desk, at home in my bedroom. And that's where I spent the last year of my PhD program. And it was weird because on top of being like COVID, isolated, I hadn't met a lot of people at Riverside, and there was no opportunity to meet anyone the year that I had left. So I basically focused on on working and that was probably why I was able to finish my dissertation on time. But it's true that it was tiring to be at home all the time. One of the things, maybe to, to counteract that, like, one of the things that we came up with doing at the Department of Pathology at UC Davis was doing virtual happy hours. So we used to, we have a tradition, where we do Happy Hour every Friday in the evening, the plant pathology graduate students. And we realized that we weren't going to be able to do that in person, but we started joining on Zoom. And that helped a bit going specially through the first months of lockdown.

16:18  
Jim: Yeah, thank you, thank you so much for sharing that. And what you're describing, I think really rings true to me and to many as we migrated through this very difficult time. And I do reflect on graduate students, particularly students that started during the pandemic, where that that opportunity to develop that cohort was was somewhat limited. It it's been, it's been difficult for all of us, I think, to navigate. And I appreciate you reflecting a little bit on how that's impacted your your research. I also your comment about that productivity component that I think a lot of us were very compelled to write. During the early days that locked down, we've seen a lot of publications come out I think, as a result of having that, that space and time to focus on on maybe datasets that we've had piling up for a while. And hopefully the worst events behind all of us. And we'll we'll get back to the new normal, whatever, whatever that means. Yeah. So you've touched a little bit on your research, in mentioned citrus, and in particular, and much of your graduate research was on HLB. I guess let's start with the host plant where where is citrus grown, both in the US and around the world. And what do you see as some of the most important threats to sucrose production. 

17:35  
Sara: So citrus are... it's a genus that has many different species, especially because it's been cultivated for many years. So there are many hybrids, but the maybe the most cultivated species are oranges. And then there are like Mandarin tangerines, and then lemons followed by pomelos and grapefruit. And they are in the US. They are mainly grown in four states but especially in in California where most of the fresh citrus is grown. Here, citrus production in California is focused on the Central Valley in in Tulare and Kern County. But there's also their citrus all the way down to Imperial Valley, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego. And I said like most of citrus production in California is for the fresh market. So it's the oranges or tangerines that you would buy in supermarket and eat fresh. And then Florida that used to be the main citrus producing state in the US. And their production was focused on the juice market. And there's also some citrus production in Texas, mainly grapefruit and in Arizona and elsewhere in the world. China is the main citrus producer. By far I think it's about 25% of it produces about 25% of citrus worldwide. But citrus are also grown in other parts of Asia and Southeast Asia. Then in the Mediterranean areas Spain is a is an important producer of citrus also, Italy and the countries in the North of Africa, Morocco, and Egypt. And then South Africa is also a citrus producer. And in the American continent, Mexico or Tintin and Brazil are also important producers. So citrus are grown from subtropical. Yeah, from subtropical to Mediterranean climates.

20:10  
Jim: And one long being, I guess, first of all, what what is it? And how big of a deal is it?

20:18  
Sara: Well, actually, at the moment, it's considered the most destructive disease of cities worldwide. It's an invasive disease that was originally described in us in Asia, the Asian type of HLB. So let's start from the beginning. One glum Bing is a bacterial disease of citrus trees. It is associated with a bacterium called candidatus liberibacter. And there are two species a sciatic ooze and africanus, and they're called candidatos. Because Koch's postulates have not been fulfilled. And both both bacteria are transmitted by an insect vector. The African type is transmitted by Trioza erytreae. And the Asian type is transmitted by the Asian citrus psyllid diaphorina CITRI. And it's that combination, the Asian citrus psyllid and candy that has to pay back to us Yeah, because that has caused the worst impact on citrus production worldwide, because HLB Well, the the bacterium reproduces on the flowing of citrus trees. So it disrupts the flow and distribution within the plant. The leafs develop a very characteristic blotchy model symptom. And most importantly, the fruit become bitter, they don't mature correctly, and they drop early. And the trees eventually die. Because there's snow until very recently, there wasn't any resistance to HLB in any of the most common citrus varieties. So it's been widely distributed in Southeast Asia and in China for many years, where they have moved citrus production, to different areas to try to escape from the environmental conditions that favor the insect vector. So they were kind of managing and living with the disease. But then it was detected for the first time in Sao Paulo in 2004, in Brazil, and then in Florida in 2005. And there, the vector was already present. And it spread very quickly, and it had a really destructive effect. So at the moment, it's it's a major threat to other cities, growing areas, its present in California, and I guess we'll talk more about that. But it's also present in Mexico, in Argentina. And for example, the the entire Mediterranean region is very concerned that they might get an introduction anytime

22:59  
Jim: Well, focusing specifically in California, then what what is the industry doing to manage HLP?

23:07  
Sara: They have invested, they have mounted a really extraordinary response to the first introduction of HLB. So HLB was first detected in California in 2012. But the vector had already been there, the Asian citrus psyllid since 2008. So the sin from 2009, the citrus industry had already decided to pass. I'm not very familiar with California law, but they kind of put a piece of legislature that allowed them to form a program that is basically funded by the growers, but it's managed in a partnership with the California Department of Food and Agriculture. So they put together this program called the citrus pest and disease prevention program and it's now a division but the growers were really on top of it. And by the time the disease was detected in 2012, they had already been trying to manage the vector and what they are what they have been doing since 2012 is on the one day define some strategic priorities. So they are trying serving the main sectors, producing areas but also residential centers in the state to try to detect the disease as early as possible and remove the infected trees so that they do not continue spreading inoculum they are also they have implemented quarantines for the movement of plants and fruit in the state so that the disease or the vector do not travel with contaminated material. There's all the citrus industry was put under like the citrus nurseries were put under, under cover with mesh that do not allow the vector to come in. So when a grower buys new plants, they are certified and to be free of the disease. And they are also controlled with insecticide so that they do not spread the vector. And then probably what I focus more on my dissertation was the part of the program where the growers are being asked to coordinate their insecticide treatments for the insect vector for the Asian citrus psyllid. So that if because it was shown early in Brazil, and in Florida, that if all the growers in a region tried to apply the insecticide spray at the same time, or within a close window, it was the effect of knocking down the Asian citrus psyllid population was much greater, so they wouldn't continue spreading the disease to nearby properties.

26:02  
Jim: That's really fascinating. And we are all in this together. This seems like a really big segue into some of the work that you've published recently. So I'm referring to your paper from earlier this year published in the Journal of Ecology and society and called a collective action in the area wide management of an invasive plant disease you wrote in the abstract area wide management, or AWM, is a strategy for invasive plant pests and diseases, in which management actions are coordinated across property boundaries to target the entire pest or pathogen population in an area. Because some people may benefit from the actions of others without bearing the costs, but group level contributions are required to achieve effective control. AWM suffers from free writing, yet it has rarely been studied as a collective action problem. What is a collective action problem? And why is this a relevant concept for plant disease management?

27:12  
Sara: So a collect collective action is needed anytime a group of people need to achieve a common goal. So you have collective action problems start to occur when you have a group of individuals that need to make contributions to achieve that goal. But at the same time, they can benefit from the efforts or the contributions of others, and they might be able to benefit without having to contribute. So there's this temptation to what to do what we call free writing. So okay, I know if all of my neighbors are going to apply insecticide treatments against the Asian citrus psyllid, if I don't have that many ACP in my property, I might be able to benefit from the treatments of everyone else without having to treat myself. So I decide not to treat. And the problem comes that if enough people do that same reasoning and decide not to treat, in the end, the group might not achieve that common goal. And really, really simplify. This is a situation that comes many in many, many different aspects of our society. So you have, for example, a classic example of a collective action problem is where people need to manage a fishery, a group of fishermen are exploiting a fishery. And they, they know that they could all fish a bit more than it's maybe allowed because they would get more individual benefits. But at the same time, if everyone fishes, then the fishery might be like, emptied, and there wouldn't be any more resources. So these types of situations where there's what we call a public good, or a common pool resource, something that can benefit a group of people that you cannot exclude others from benefit from benefiting from it. There's always this temptation to free right? And over time, and it's been really studied by the social sciences, societies, groups of people have developed what are called institutions, so rules to manage these types of resources in common, so that everyone can benefit but if they can be preserved, and what we did and the sentences that you read in that paper, at some point, we tried to apply some of the research and the theories that had been developed in the social sciences to study collective action problems and how groups of people approach those types of problems. We realized that that was more or less the situation that citrus growers in California were facing. So we tried to apply Some of those theories to the context of HLB management in California or the management of invasive species in general. And I have to say, like, we are not the first ones, and we are not the only ones over the years, I think there there are many researchers not only in pathology, but also in wheat science or in entomology, that have realized that we were missing a heap of really vast literature on how to approach these problems, that we can now try to bring to the field of time pathology to improve the management of pests in general, not only plant diseases, but also insect pests and weeds.

30:44  
Jim: So you mentioned your move to UC Riverside, during your your PhD research, to work with a collaborator, was that collaborator a plant pathologist?

30:56  
Sara: NO, my dissertation committee, where a plant pathologist, a political scientist, and an economist,

31:05  
Jim: If you tell me that you had your defense in a bar, the program's gonna end right now?

31:12  
Sara: No, my defense was online, it was really like not a thing at all.

31:21  
Jim: Sorry, you had a very diverse committee, many different disciplines represented. Could you talk a little bit about working in that interdisciplinary research is something that certainly funding agencies want to see, academic institutions want to see that many of us really believe that the way to, to push plant health to new levels is to work across disciplines? You did this in real time? What was that like for you?

31:50  
Sara: Um, it was challenging. So I come from, as I said, like, I came from an engineering and agronomy biology perspective. But I started to get interested in the social aspects of plant disease management and how regulations are, or policies are designed to deal with plant health problems. And Neil was very, and I think this is a really important thing to have the person that you work for, if he or she acknowledges that this is valuable, and that you should push the boundaries, that's really important. So I started, like, in the early months of my PhD, I started reading really diverse sources of literature, not only plant pathology, but I read like a couple books, I took a couple of courses from other graduate programs. And I started to find things that I could take from those different fields that I thought could be useful for my research, then, yeah, so like, being exposed to other points of view, I think it's very important. It's also true that you get sometimes overwhelmed with ideas, and you're not sure how to make them into a concrete dissertation that you need to present to your qualifying exam committee. So it took me a while to put together what my dissertation was going to be. But then I think having a committee with two people from other disciplines, and really participating in the meetings from other groups, going even if I was only auditing to other courses, you start to find common points you need. And when you get sufficiently familiar with the terminology, and the concepts and the theories and how research is designed in other disciplines, you can at some point, you reach a level where you can start to have a real conversation with with people from other disciplines where you start to understand each other and do constructive research. So I would say it's, it's challenging, but it can be done. It's also true that you're you're going to have to realize that you're always going to be somewhere in between, like, I'm not sure I consider myself a real plant pathologist or an epidemiologist anymore. And I'm not a social scientist, but I think being able to work somewhere in between is also another career option.

34:42  
Jim: Yes, it strikes me that you're really describing a degree of professional vulnerability that we have to be open and vulnerable to really work in that space. You mentioned the terminology and that's, that's something that often trips me up The as I explore other even related fields of study that the terminology and sometimes the the way we frame problems the way we think about problems to be difficult or different. And what you're telling us is that it's worth that pain to work through that.

35:19  
Sara: Yeah, I think because I think if, if many people, you're only going to make a really small contribution, but if many people start, like bringing some of those ideas, and this is done all the time, in all disciplines, you can really start discovering new approaches or new solutions to things. So I would say it's worth exploring.

35:48  
Jim: That's fantastic advice, to tell us a bit about what you're doing now.

35:53  
Sara: So when I came back to Europe, I was looking for options to work in plant health policy, but the way it is handled in the European Union and some of the countries is, you really have to be a civil servant, to be part of the equivalent of the USDA Aphis, or the CDFA. So I realized that working in plant health policy from a public perspective was not going to be easy. And then this opportunity came came up to work for a consultancy company called prosper and partners. That is based in Brussels, and thus, policy advice, this policy analysis for associations in the fields of agriculture and food industry. So this was another way of interacting with policy and trying to bring science to policy and adapt policy design to the realities of the agricultural sector, but from a private perspective. So a lot of what I'm doing at the moment, working as a consultant for Prospero is analyzing the legislative proposals from the European Union in some fields, like the Common Agricultural Policy or legislation on fertilizers or plant protection products, and trying to analyze it very carefully and see the implications that that proposal would have for the industry. So one of our clients is the European Biostimulants Industry Council. And there, we try to defend the interests of plant biostimulants industry in front of the EU institutions.

37:51  
Jim: When you're playing, it seems like a really logical and impactful extension of the work that you started as a grad student.

37:59  
Sara: Yeah, instead of working on plant health policy, I'm now working on other aspects of agricultural policy. So at some point into the future, I hope to be able to merge the different interests. But yeah, I feel like some of the training that I received in grad school, not only being able to, like understand how to frame a research problem, and how to do, what type of analysis would be needed, but also how that is how it connects with the realities and different interests of the different stakeholders. All that gave me adequate training for my current job.

38:43  
Jim: It sounds really exciting, and I can't wait to see where you take this next. Clearly, you've got a really great career ahead and deeply appreciate your perspectives. Sure. Before we go, do you have any last comments for for listeners?

39:00  
Sara: I know just that I'm looking forward to this entire season 2 of Plantopia.

39:07  
Jim: Oh, that's a great plug. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you being here today, Sarah. Thanks. So we just heard from Dr. Sara Garcia Figuera, plant pathologist working for Prospero & Partners, consulting on agribusiness issues across Europe and the US. I'm Jim Bradeen, the host of the Plantopia podcast, a production of the American Phytopathological Society. Thank you for listening and we will see you next episode.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai