Spotlight

With support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture - Foreign Agricultural Service, the Cacao and Chocolate Research Network (CCRN) at The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) is pleased to announce the 2019-2020 Visiting Scientist Program. The program will support visiting scientists to work with Penn State faculty and international collaborators to advance research that is critical to the development of the fine flavor cacao/chocolate industry in Latin America and the Caribbean. These visiting scientists will spend six months at Penn State. Currently, the program is only accepting applications for economics research of the fine flavor cacao market. Exchanges will take place within the September 2019 to May 2020 timeframe, with exact dates to be determined jointly by the visiting scientist and his/her Penn State faculty mentor.

The Penn State Endowed program in the Molecular Biology of Cacao is pleased to announce the 2019 Summer Internship Program for minority undergraduate college students supported by the Plant Genome Program of the National Science Foundation. The internship period is 8 weeks (June 1 to July 30, 2019). The interns will participate in plant genetics, molecular biology, biotechnology or bioinformatics research on Theobroma cacao, the chocolate tree. During the first 2 weeks of the internship period at Penn State, University Park campus in Pennsylvania, the interns will be introduced to cacao resercah. In the laboratory, the interns will join research teams and will be mentored by a postdoctoral and/or a graduate student researcher. For the following 4-week period the interns will join members of the research team to travel to Costa Rica where they will participate in a 2-week summer session at Earth University focusing on sustainable development and 2-week training at the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE) in Costa Rica. Prior to the trip all students will participate in an international agricultural development orientation workshop presented by International Agriculture and Development Graduate Programs (INTAD) graduate students at Penn State. Following the training in Costa Rica, the internship will conclude with 2 weeks back at Penn State, University Park campus. At the completion of the internship, each participant will be required to prepare a presentation and present at a project meeting involving all participants.