Planned gift with deep roots in AgBio

The college alumni have arranged planned gifts in their wills that will establish annual scholarships in their names for domestic and international MSc and PhD students. The future awards, to be aligned with the annual domestic tuition fees of the day, are a nod to both their experiences at and connections to the college over the years, but also to the successful careers they’ve built from their university education.

“This planned gift is all kind of new for us,” said Christensen. “We just put this together in the last few months, but we’ve been talking about it for a long time.”

Solohub added they were both lucky to have benefited from scholarships while doing their graduate studies, and they both also know the financial pressures students face.

“When you’re going through grad school, you’re just so poor,” said Christensen. “A scholarship could mean a student won’t have to get a part-time job and can really focus on school.”

Christensen and Solohub, who met at a grad student mixer at the Kernen Crop Research Farm, are specific about the eligibility requirements for each scholarship. The Christensen award will go to a student in the Department of Animal and Poultry Science whose thesis work is directly relevant to the agricultural producers of Western Canada, a reflection of her own studies and career path. 

“I was a farm kid from Young,” she said. “My parents had a mixed farm, then moved to just dry-land agriculture so driving grain trucks became my specialty, but I really loved science.”

Christensen’s first degree was a BSc majoring in physiology. After a year teaching English in Japan, she secured a job as a technician at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) on the USask campus “where I realized I really loved lab work.”

Her experience at VIDO led her to the Department of Animal and Poultry Science where, after one year in a master’s program, she was elevated to a PhD in animal physiology doing research on a vaccine for pigs designed to increase litter size. While the results were promising, the vaccine ultimately proved to be impractical for producers, “and I realized there are all kinds of science that never make it into the real world. I loved doing that PhD, but I wasn’t sure how to put it all together to get a job.”

It all came together while she was working at the college’s Virtual College of Biotechnology and also taking classes for a business certificate.

“I realized science could be business,” she said.

Christensen went on to serve as general manager of the Saskatchewan Colostrum Company, a spinoff from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine that collected and freeze-dried dairy colostrum for sale around the world.

From there, she moved to the Canadian Light Source (CLS) to help establish the Biomedical Imaging and Therapy Beamline before joining its business development unit to introduce agriculture companies to the possibilities of synchrotron science.

She returned to the college, to the Feeds Innovation Institute, to work on by-products from processes like biofuel production and oilseed crushing, which again made use of both her science and business skills. It was satisfying “to work with dozens of companies producing products out of our own western Canadian grains,” she said.

Christensen again combines her scientific and business background in her current position as a research grant administrator working with agriculture companies in Saskatchewan.

For Solohub, soil has been at the heart of his studies and his career, so the scholarship in his name will go to a graduate student in the Department of Soil Science whose research is relevant to mapping, genesis, or fertility of soil.

Even as a young man growing up in Wynyard, Solohub knew he wanted a career that would take him outdoors. To that end, he completed his first undergraduate degree at USask in physical geography. After “bouncing around for a couple of years,” he headed back to university, this time majoring in soil science, a discipline that complimented his geography training.

With his BSA in hand, Solohub spent a year in Calgary doing soil surveys as a contractor. It was there he learned two things: “I liked the college, and Calgary was too big.” He returned to the university for a master’s in precision agriculture at the Department of Soil Science, and stayed on to work in the department for six years. He spent another six years with the Centre for Hydrology in the Department of Geography before taking a position as a soil scientist with the consulting company contracted to undertake the pre-disturbance environmental impact assessment for the BHP Potash mine at Jansen, Sask.

It was then time “to strike out on my own” as a contractor. One of his main clients is Wood Buffalo Environmental Association in northern Alberta’s Athabasca Basin. The organization is a non-profit coalition of communities, environmental groups, industry, government, Indigenous partners, and public stakeholders that, among other projects, monitors the effects of pollution on jack pine forests. Solohub brings his soils and hydrology skills to the work in the areas of environmental compliance and forest health.

Furthering his love of the outdoors, he has also worked for a couple of years doing high-elevation grasslands soil surveys for coal companies in British Columbia. It’s a job with helicopters being the only way in and out.

Most of Solohub’s work involves sophisticated instrumentation “but I also like digging holes and looking at soil.” In fact, there’s a photo in their home of him standing knee deep in a hole in an open field, decked out in hard hat and high visibility vest, and being keenly observed by a semi-circle of cattle. His smile says it all about Solohub’s love of soil and the outdoors.

Solohub and Christensen have deep roots in the college, having both spent about a dozen years there as students and employees, and their planned gift is a very personal way to give back. Solohub acknowledged that donations come in many forms “but the idea of being able to help out a student was most important to me.”

Christensen agreed. 

“It was most important to me too,” she said. “This could change someone’s life.”

Agknowledge, Fall 2024

Article originally published at https://agbio.usask.ca