Meet the Member Mondays- Nana

Tropical forests have been cut down for different kinds of monoculture plantations (where there is only one species of crop in the plantation) such as oil palm, rubber, coffee, cacao, tea. All lovely animals and plants are gone and local people, who rely on the forest, may face lack of water, less food a few years after the forest is gone.

This is the background of my PhD in Ecological Economics. I do spatial analysis and map the economic benefit of the crops. I tell people where and where not to plant and what they are going to lose if they do or don't in the long run.

After my PhD I end up with working in an international agroforestry NGO, called World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF), where I met my husband. He was a conference coordinator and a researcher on Eco-health with ICRAF. He was the first guy who gave me the brightest smile in the early morning when I walked in the office.

My name is Zhuangfang Yi, 28. All of my friends, colleagues and family call me Nana. I received my PhD degree from Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2012, and am now a scientist at ICRAF and also a researcher at CAS. I am originally from a very remote village, kind of inside of the tropical jungle, on the border of SW China with Laos. My husband, Benjamin Custer, is a 2LT in the Army, and is in his first year of medical school.

We lived together in Kunming, SW China before we moved to the states together. In China we biked 8 miles to the office together every day. Biking through traffic chaos and dust were the most intensively stressful hours I had been through in my life. People would drive, walk, stand, talk and bock the bike lane when we speed up. However, Ben always led the way, I was just shadowing him and kind of enjoying the chaos later. He is also the one who led us when we got lost in a tropical jungle. When we heard that USU accepted him, it was a thrill, we held each other’s hands and jumped around for while, and then we decided to get married. We had been dating 10 months and two months later I followed him to the states.

Moving to the states and being a wife is a big life transition for me, but Ben is always there, very supportive and proud of what I am doing and learning. Life is never easy, however, USU and the SSC have brought joy to our life and we appreciate it. Besides that, what his left for us is ‘to make our life easy together’, which is what we’ve been doing and we are enjoying the teamwork so far.