Our Team

Sustainable Agriculture Leadership Team

Sustainable production is a demanding and rewarding practice. We have an interdisciplinary team of faculty and staff that collectively guide the direction of our research, education, production, and partnerships.

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Laura Livingston

Director of Sustainable Agriculture, Assistant Professor of Food Studies

Originally from southwestern Virginia, Laura attended Oberlin College for her Undergraduate degree, where she worked on farms and was a lead-composter in the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association. After graduating, Laura became an Agriculture Advisor in the Peace Corps, serving over two years in Ghana. Laura returned to the USA, working on an organic farm for one season before starting graduate school at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Laura received a Masters in Agroecology and a PhD in Environment and Resources. During her graduate program, she worked on participatory plant breeding projects with farmers and chefs, collaboratively built an organic farm manager apprenticeship program and evaluation tools, and worked with agricultural educational programs in Madison, Wisconsin and in Ghana. Laura brings these multitudes of experiences to her Eden Hall Farm.

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Indira Ortiz

Farm Manager

Indira Ortiz has been at Eden Hall Farm as a Chatham Employee since 2019. Originally from Honduras, she holds a bachelor's in environmental and socioeconomic development and a master's degree in Agroforestry and Sustainable Agriculture from CATIE in Costa Rica. Her experience includes project management, organic crop production, integrated pest management, student training and supervision, experiential learning, and maple syrup production. 

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Chris Murakami

Associate Professor of Agroecology

Chris has worked in school gardens and urban farms in Los Angeles, CA, and Columbia, MO, before moving to the Pittsburgh area. His PhD research focused on designing learning around authentic, real-time decision making contexts in sustainable agriculture education. He has applied this approach to research on teaching and learning to the design of garden and farm based learning for the Eden Hall Farm in the Basic Agroecology and Growing Sustainably Lab courses. Chris focuses on biologically intensive production of vegetables and fruits (especially alliums) and engages with urban farmers in the Pittsburgh area.

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Nadine Lehrer

Associate Professor of Food Studies

Nadine’s farm experience evolved from backyard tomatoes in the Northeast to urban garden management during college, to seasonal work on a diversified vegetable CSA in Illinois, an educational farm with rare breeds of livestock in Maine, and a beef cattle/agroforestry operation in Minnesota. Nadine has worked too as an arborist (with trees) in New York City, interned with a damselfly biologist in Panama, and did research alongside small-scale farmers in Peru. Her PhD focused on U.S. agricultural policy, and she teaches a range of courses at Chatham including ones that focus on dairy and meat production. She currently raises small numbers of goats, sheep, chickens, and cows at home with family. Nadine’s interactions with Eden Hall farm mostly center around course visits and activities.

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Alice Julier

Director of CRAFT, Professor of Food Studies

Alice Julier is a professor and the founding program director of the Food Studies program at Chatham.  She is also the Director of CRAFT, the Center for Regional Agriculture, Food, and Transformation which offers research, training, and food system support for food businesses, organizations, and farms.  She was hired in 2009 when Chatham first took stewardship of Eden Hall and during her interview, an eco-feminist Shakespeare professor, a theater arts professor, a microbiologist, and a crop scientist showed her the gardens they worked and sent her home with produce and she was hooked.  Over the last fifteen years, she has spent some summers in the ADG doing work-and-pick, some in the kitchen doing canning and food preservation, some foraging blackberries and mushrooms, and some just watching and supporting everyone’s work.

Student Leaders

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    Dayanara Uribasterra

    Dayanara “Die” Uribasterra serves as the Graduate Agroecology Assistant at Eden Hall, where she is pursing a Masters in Food Studies. A chef and forager from Miami, Florida, Die is a self-described “Miami-Cuban swamp child” who grew up fishing the Caribbean, canoeing the Everglades and roasting whole hogs. In her personal work as a chef-forager, Dayanara strives to obtain, uplift and educate on obscured knowledge of the land (especially of the Caribbean) by sourcing lesser known wild edibles and highlighting them as prospective food staples and provocative delicacies. As a disabled, trans Latina of a refugee diaspora, she is particularly passionate about creating community-oriented learning and work opportunities in the kitchen and in agriculture for disabled and trans people of color.

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    Anthony Ondo

    Anthony Ondo is a sustainable business undergraduate at Chatham University’s Falk School of Sustainability. He is the student manager of the university’s apiary program, overseeing hive management and student engagement activities. He enjoys working with his fellow student employees and showing them new practices and techniques. Anthony also operates his own business where he provides pollination services and sells honey to retailers in the region. His love of beekeeping, although started before attending Chatham has been furthered thanks to the unique farm and apiary program at Eden Hall campus.

See our team in action

A young woman and a man working outdoors on a wooden table, preparing or harvesting vegetables, with a house wall and windows in the background.
Two women planting and holding plants in a greenhouse filled with various green plants and flowers, with gardening tools and a black bucket in the foreground.
A woman with glasses and a bun hairstyle holding a framed honeycomb frame, wearing a beige 'Friends Not Foes' t-shirt, using a yellow tool to scrape honey, in a room with light-colored walls and a whiteboard.
A woman in a beekeeping suit smiling and giving two thumbs up outdoors near a large tree surrounded by grass and greenery.
Person planting seeds in soil inside a black container, with a seedling tray nearby, in a greenhouse or indoor gardening space.