Marina Vergara is from Croton-on-Hudson, a small town outside of New York City. After graduating from Cornell University with a BS in Environmental and Sustainability Sciences, Marina moved to Panama to serve with the US Peace Corps as an Agriculture Extension Agent, working with small-scale cacao farmers in product development, marketing, and sales. In this role, she learned more about agroforestry and the cultural importance of cacao, as well as the challenges farmers faced in accessing information and markets for their products.

Marina’s research interests broadly are in extension, food sovereignty, sustainable supply chains, and cacao. She hopes to better support producers by furthering the accessibility of information from the research and academic side to the farmer and producer side. In her program, she hopes to focus her research on supporting small scale cacao farmers, explore the impacts of sustainable supply chain models that already exist, and examine extension and development projects in the US and abroad.

In her free time, you can find Marina outside hiking, biking, or lounging with her dog Claudia, at the local coffee shop with a good book, or trying something new and tasty to eat.