Vivian Wauters joined UC SAREP as a project scientist in 2024. In this role, she is working with Sonja Brodt on a project to support co-learning and institutional capacity-building within a multi-organizational network to help accelerate adoption of climate-adaptive and climate-mitigating practices among California farmers. Activities within this project include strengthening the California Farm Demonstration Network through institutional capacity-building and applied, participatory on-farm research, as well as facilitating a soil health assessment that will support farmer decision-making and establish a baseline for continued investigation of California-specific soil health and resilience indicators.

Vivian is interested in how we can foster agroecological transitions and transformations, and how the collaboration of multiple forms of knowledge and expertise can build capacity for stewarding multifunctional agricultural systems. She comes most recently from a postdoc position at UC Davis. She holds a PhD in Applied Plant Sciences-Agronomy/Agroecology from University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and an MA in Linguistics from UC Berkeley. Vivian has also been a vegetable farm worker in Minnesota and California and grew up in the Sierra Nevada Foothills.