Ryan Stewart named assistant professor of crop and soil environmental sciences
Ryan Stewart has been appointed assistant professor of crop and soil environmental sciences in Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Stewart is one of 19 new faculty members that were recently hired in the college. New positions in the college were identified to bring new talent to its focus areas, including food and health, infectious disease, biodesign and processing, and agricultural profitability and environmental sustainability. The new faculty members are distributed across teaching, research, and Extension.
He received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from California Polytechnic State University, and a master's degree and doctoral degree in water resource engineering Oregon State University.
During his academic career at Oregon State University he was the recipient of the Ralph M. Lunde Memorial Award in 2011 and the Myron G. Cropsey Award in 2010.
As part of The Critical Zone Research Lab at Virginia Tech, Stewart’s research focuses on quantifying and scaling interactions between water, soil, and plant communities. This includes a combination of field work, laboratory analysis, and development of modeling frameworks. We foster active collaboration across disciplines, working on topics that span ecology, engineering, agriculture, and urban systems.
The Critical Zone Research Lab utilizes three main approaches: concepts derived from fundamental principles, observations employing novel techniques, and synthesis combining analytical quantification with numerical experiments.
Previously Stewart served in the Peace Corps as a basic sanitation volunteer in Huacareta, Bolivia.
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