John Bovay named David M. Kohl Junior Faculty Fellow

John Bovay, assistant professor of agricultural and applied economics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech, has been named the David M. Kohl Junior Faculty Fellow by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.

The Kohl Junior Faculty Fellowship supports a faculty member in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the Kohl Agribusiness Centre who seeks to create and enhance undergraduate experiential learning opportunities that integrate research and service to solve real world agribusiness problems. The fellowship honors Professor Emeritus David M. Kohl for his 25 years as a professor of agricultural finance, small business management, and entrepreneurship in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics. Kohl was a prominent Extension economist who routinely worked with agricultural producers, agribusiness firms, lenders, and policy makers to address practical problems that confronted Virginia’s farmers and agricultural sector.

Bovay will hold the fellowship for a period of three years.

A member of the Virginia Tech community since 2019, Bovay’s scholarship focuses on the economics of regulation, with applications to the topics of food-safety regulation, food labeling — including labeling of genetically engineered food — and food waste. He strives to be actively engaged with agricultural producers, organizations, and commodity groups in Virginia and the  mid-Atlantic to ensure that these groups have access to a timely economic analysis of relevant policies.

Bovay has a decade of experience working with producers and industry groups, policy makers, and students in Virginia and along the East Coast. He is a member of the Southern Economics Association and Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.

His teaching and mentoring activities align with his integrated research and Extension programs, and Bovay challenges his students to understand the most policy-relevant research questions related to food and agriculture value chains and the most appropriate and rigorous methods for investigating these questions.

Bovay received his bachelor’s degree from Washington and Lee University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis.