GOHA Announces Spring 2026 Graduate Travel Awardees

Ajinkya Atkare

Food Science | College of Agriculture & Life Sciences

Destination: Pomona, California
Purpose: Attend and present poster at the Gordon Research Conference (GRC)

Ajinkya Atkare is a first year Ph.D. student in the Food Sustainability Group within the Department of Food, Bioprocessing, and Nutrition Sciences at NC State University. His research, funded by the Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein at NC State, focuses on evaluating the environmental sustainability and economic feasibility of novel technologies and sustainable solutions for food systems. He is currently developing Machine Learning (ML)-based models for Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Techno-Economic Analysis (TEA) of sustainable proteins. Ajinkya holds an M.S. in Food Science from NC State and an MBA specializing in Food and Agribusiness Management. He is also a Founding Member and Co-President of the Alt Protein Project (APP) student group at NC State, an initiative affiliated with the Good Food Institute dedicated to fostering an alternative protein ecosystem on campus.

Blanca Camacho

Comparative Biomedical Sciences | College of Veterinary Medicine

Destination: Commercial dairies in California, Texas, and Florida
Purpose: Conduct a needs assessment of U.S. Spanish-speaking dairy workers’ understanding of antimicrobial stewardship and withdrawal times.

Dr. Camacho is a doctoral student at NC State University. She completed a Ruminant Health residency at NC State in 2023 and obtained her board certification in Large Animal Internal Medicine in 2024. Dr. Camacho graduated from UC Davis, completed an internship at Colorado State University, and worked as an associate veterinarian in a mixed-animal practice in Northeast Texas. Prior to starting her residency, she worked in Tulare, CA as a dairy ambulatory clinician. Dr. Camacho is committed to advancing student, client, and producer education alike!

Olivia Mathieson

Microbiology | College of Sciences

Destination: The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
Purpose: Training opportunity to learn and perform specialized techniques in microscopy and entomology directly contributing to Ph.D. work

Olivia Mathieson is a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in the Microbiology program at NC State University, advised by Dr. Manuel Kleiner. Her research centers on understanding animal-microbe interactions from multiple angles (evolution to function) and across the spectrum of host-microbe interaction ecology (beneficial to parasitic). In her dissertation research, she is using metaproteomics to explore fundamental mechanisms of reproductive manipulation of insects by bacterial symbionts. Her work focuses on the reproductive manipulator Cardinium and Cardinium-induced reproductive phenotypes in the parasitoid wasp Encarsia. She is working to identify Cardinium proteins responsible for reproductive manipulation and is exploring systemic host response to Cardinium association. Olivia also studies evolutionary dynamics of host-associated microbes through characterizing mobile genetic element population structure in genomes of chemosynthetic symbionts in marine invertebrates. Through the Global One Health Graduate Travel Award, Olivia will be traveling to the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ. There she will spend several weeks in the laboratory of Dr. Martha (Molly) Hunter training in and collecting data through specialized microscopy techniques, such as fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and microscopy aided dissection of the tiny Encarsia parasitoid wasps. Further, Olivia will work with Dr. Hunter’s team to develop materials for a citizen science initiative that aims to identify cryptic Encarsia species to better understand this natural pest control species in the United States.