People

Silvia Rondon, Director, Oregon IPM Center

Silvia Rondon is the Oregon IPM Center director and Professor and Extension Entomology Specialist at Oregon State University in the Department of Crop & Soil Sciences. She received her BA and MS in Entomology from the Agraria University in Lima, Perú, and PhD in Crop Sciences with a major in Entomology and Integrated Pest Management (IPM) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2002, she worked as a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Florida Horticulture Department. In Sept-2005, she joined Oregon State University. Her position description includes Research and Extension and she has managed her Irrigated Agricultural Entomology Program relying on external funding coming from private, international, state, and federal grants. Her area of expertise is IPM with emphasis in insect ecology, insect distribution, population dynamics, insects-plant interactions, biological control, insect-plant pathogens interactions, and chemical control. She has been involved working with multiple commodities groups including potatoes, grass seed, wheat, and high valuable vegetables including onions, sweet corn, and carrots. She has over 123 peer reviewed scientific and extension papers, 9 book chapters, 146 non-peer reviewed publications, and multiple abstracts, and reports. She is an active member of the Entomological Society of America where she is a member of the Division, Equity and Inclusion task force and past Award committee chair; she led the organization of the first Latino/Hispanic Symposium in her professional society, now on its 9th year.

Brittany Barker, Assistant Research Professor

Brittany earned her PhD in Biology at the University of New Mexico and obtained a B.S. in Zoology at Oregon State University. She uses bioinformatic tools to study how animal and plant population dynamics are influenced by environmental changes resulting from climate change, land use, fires, and invasive species. Her current research focuses on supporting agriculture by developing climate driven models for several invasive insect pests. Before joining the Oregon IPM Center in 2019, she  worked as an Ecologist with the USGS Forest Rangeland and Ecosystem Science Center (FRESC) in Boise, Idaho, and completed a competitive postdoctoral fellowship in the Ecology and Evolutionary Department at the University of Arizona. You may learn more about her work at brittanysbarker.org.  

Len Coop, Associate Professor of Practice, Associate Director of the Oregon IPM Center

Len supports agriculture in general by developing and placing online, weather and climate driven models for numerous areas including IPM/pest models, plant disease risk models, crop models, horticultural models, beneficial species models, climate suitability models, and others. Len is the Associate Director for Decision Support Systems at the Oregon IPM Center and Director of the website USPEST.ORG.

Jessica Green, Senior Research Assistant

Jessica holds a M.S. in Horticulture from Oregon State University and has worked as a vegetable crop entomologist at OSU since 2011. She works part-time for the Center; producing our monthly newsletter and serving as project manager for VegNet, a regional crop pest monitoring and reporting system. Her other role is within the Pesticide Safety Education Program, where she develops content and delivers trainings for pesticide applicators. Jessica brings practical, field-based expertise to the team and is particularly interested in pest dynamics and how agricultural producers can utilize IPM to predict and protect against crop loss.

Thomas A. Jima, IPM Educator

Thomas holds M.S. in Plant Biology specializing in Plant Pathology from Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), Sweden and M.S. in Entomology from Addis Ababa University (AAU), Ethiopia. He received his B.S. in Plant Sciences from Alamaya University, Ethiopia. He has over 10 years of experience in agricultural development, research, project management, capacity building, and stakeholder management with an emphasis on plant protection and integrated pest management (IPM). Before joining OIPMC, Thomas was a Senior Plant Protection Advisor at SNV Netherlands Development Organization, providing technical support and capacity building to adopt IPM, good agricultural practices (GAP) and safer and responsible use of pesticide to horticulture farmers, government partners and the private sector.

Dani Lightle, Assistant Professor of Practice

Dani earned her PhD in Entomology from OSU. From 2014 to 2019, Dani worked in tree crop research and extension with University of California, Agriculture & Natural Resources. In 2019, Dani returned to OSU to lead the IR-4 / Pesticide Registration Research program based at the North Willamette Research and Extension Center (NWREC). Her research focuses on completion of IR-4 residue trials to expand pesticide labels for new uses in specialty crops, and efficacy trials for insect pests across a variety of cropping systems. She serves as the Oregon State Liaison Representative to IR-4, where she advocates for the needs of Oregon specialty crop producers at the national level, and as the Network Coordinator for the Pacific Northwest for the Western IPM Center. Her grower outreach works to keep Oregon’s specialty crop industries informed of changes in the pesticide regulatory landscape.

Paola Sotelo-Cardona, IPM Educator

Paola holds a B.S. in Biology from Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia), a M.S. in Agricultural Sciences-Plant Breeding from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Palmira, Colombia), and a PhD in Entomology from Kansas State University. Prior to joining the OIPMC she worked as Scientist-Entomology at the World Vegetable Center (HQ Taiwan) providing technical support and capacity building on safe and sustainable vegetable production strategies in various countries, including, East and West Africa, India, Taiwan, and Thailand. She also worked for the Colombian Corporation of Agricultural Research (AGROSAVIA) in Colombia and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Applied Entomology group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Switzerland. Her research interests include biology and ecology of insect pests; integrated pest management; host plant resistance; research methodologies in entomology and plant breeding; application of statistical methods to insect ecology; and chemical ecology of plant-insect interactions.  Her publications are available here.