(06/03/19) BATON ROUGE, La. — The LSU AgCenter recently hosted a professor from the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra, Slovakia, for two weeks to discuss ways to exchange ideas.
Lucia Gabriny Gresova, director of the AgroBioTech Research Centre at the Slovak University of Agriculture, was here to observe how project management is conducted at the LSU AgCenter, said Jonathan Hubchen, assistant director of the AgCenter Global Network.
While here she spent a substantial amount of time observing the operations of the AgCenter Food Incubator to identify practices that can be applied at her home university.
Gresova said she is exploring strategies that will further facilitate collaborative linkages between the AgCenter and her university.
“My mission is to see if there are areas where we may overlap in programming and how we can work together on research projects,” she said.
She toured a number of AgCenter facilities and visited with researchers and administrators to get a better understanding of things the two universities have in common.
“I was extremely interested in the Food Incubator because we also are in the process of developing a food incubator program back home,” she said.
Gresova said she found there is overlap in some areas, especially in food processing and in horticulture.
The next step once Gresova returns home is to set up a doctoral student exchange program with the AgCenter and to work on more collaboration between researchers at both schools.
Hubchen said this exchange is helpful in identifying programs the two universities can work on collaboratively.
“This program is different from the Borlaug fellows that we recently hosted,” he said. ”Unlike the Borlaug fellows, who are funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, this program is funded through the European Union.”
Hubchen said instead of the 10 weeks of the Borlaug Fellowship Program, where the guests work on a research project, the ERASMUS Mobility Scholars spend two weeks here on more of a fact-finding mission.
“She was here looking for ways that the two universities can work together on similar projects,” Hubchen said.
Lucia Gabriny Gresova, director of the AgroBioTech Research Centre at the Slovak University of Agriculture and an ERASMUS Mobility Scholar, speaks to LSU AgCenter staff about her two week visit to observe how project management is conducted at the LSU AgCenter. Photo by Johnny Morgan/LSU AgCenter
The LSU AgCenter and the LSU College of Agriculture