Virginia Tech alumna earns prestigious agricultural fellowship

A recent Virginia Tech alumna was selected as an International Agricultural Education Fellowship Program fellow for the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture, a unit of Texas A&M AgriLife.

Megan Pollok ’24, from Danville, Virginia, was one of nine fellows selected across the country in spring 2024. Recipients were chosen from the numerous applicants for their passion for agriculture education, their leadership, and their unique life experiences.

The fellows will take their passion for agriculture education to communities in September 2024 and will serve for 10 months as agriculture teachers, Cooperative Extension agents, and 4-H advisors to help support agricultural education in either rural Ghanaian or Guatemalan communities.

They will also work in classrooms with local teaching partners. The experience will be unique for each fellow based on the needs of the community in which they are assigned. Common to all fellows, though, is the lasting impact of their work.

“It’s an honor to be selected for this opportunity,” said Pollok, who will be working in Ghanaian communities. “This prestigious fellowship has a lasting impact on the global community, and I am thrilled to be able to help people and to follow in the footsteps of previous Virginia Tech alumni that have participated in this program.”

In her time in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Pollok had an extraordinary impact on local and international communities. As an undergraduate, she researched fusarium head blight, a fungal crop disease that affects the head of the plant, where it renders seeds unusable while also spreading the disease throughout the field and infecting the entire crop.

In her senior year, Pollok traveled to Ghana to assist the people of Kpone Katamanso in building a community garden, one of the first in the region. The community garden plans were developed in conjunction with Jeanette Ankoma-Sey, a Ghanaian-American professional landscape designer in Northern Virginia, and Virginia Tech horticulture alumni.

The design used feedback from the community to be able to help family members produce enough food for their families - specifically, foods they would enjoy and look forward to eating, such as okra, tomatoes, hot peppers, and carrots.

“I had fantastic international opportunities at Virginia Tech and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences that showed me the impact that we can have by working together with communities abroad,” Pollok said. “This opportunity will allow me to continue the momentum I built as a student and carry it into the future.”