The director’s position of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture will soon be getting filled with one of three candidates coming in to be interviewed over the course of the next three weeks.

According to a news release from the ISU College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the first candidate, Abdullah Jaradat, comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s North Central Soil Conservation Research Lab.

Jaradat will be visiting the ISU campus Nov. 28 for a seminar at 9:30 a.m. in Room 1951 in Food Sciences Building.

Jaradat works as a research leader, location coordinator and supervisory research agronomist for the North Central Soil Conservation Research Lab, a facility of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service in Morris, Minn. He also works as an adjunct professor of agronomy and plant genetics at the University of Minnesota and an adjunct professor of science at Southwest Minnesota State University, conducting and managing research on organic and conventional production agriculture, with an emphasis on modeling yield variation of crops under diverse management practices.

Jaradat has a B.S. in dry-land agriculture from the University of Damascus, an M.S. in agronomy from the University of Jordan and a Ph.D in plant breeding and genetics from Washington State University.