UT Institute of Agriculture Presents Top Faculty and Staff Awards for 2025
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – The accomplishments of the faculty and staff of the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture were celebrated at an annual awards luncheon held on the UT Knoxville campus in the new Agriculture and Natural Resources Building on July 30. Many of the awards are gifts made possible by faculty, alumni and friends of the institute.
UTIA Senior Vice Chancellor and Senior Vice President Keith Carver hosted the luncheon and praised the honorees for their work. “The enthusiasm and expertise demonstrated by our UTIA faculty and staff is unparalleled,” he said. “I am always in awe of their dedication to providing real life solutions to the people of Tennessee. These well-deserved awards represent impacts and accomplishments that benefit Tennesseans and society now and for years to come.”
Debasish Saha, assistant professor in the Department of Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science, received the UT AgResearch Dean’s Grantsmanship Award. This award recognizes the extraordinary effort of faculty members in successfully securing competitive extramural grants and contracts and who exceed expectations of good departmental/institutional citizenship. The award is based on the total dollar amount of competitive extramural grants/contracts secured by the faculty member serving as principal or co-principal investigator. Other winners of this year’s award are Patrick Keyser, professor in the School of Natural Resources, and Scott Lenaghan, associate professor in the Department of Food Science.
Saha said grant writing is an artform all to itself and goes beyond conducting meaningful research. “Writing grant proposals involves conveying science wrapped in an envelope of art, which is quite different from writing scientific articles, as the audience can be very different. Of course, there is substantial uncertainty—my best one was never funded—but we learn from both the successful and the unsuccessful ones,” he said.
Saha, who came to UTIA in 2020, studies sustainable management of the soil nitrogen cycle in agricultural systems by using practices such as no-till or reduced till, cover crops and animal waste management. He and his lab team secured a USDA NIFA grant of $499,000 to develop a novel mechanism of forming anoxic soil microclimate and managing cover crops for nitrous oxide mitigation. Another multi-institution (UTIA, UT Knoxville, Penn State and Michigan State University) NIFA project with $650,000 in funding uses global data to develop AI models for accurate and efficient prediction of agricultural nitrous oxide emissions. In 2022, Saha won the Department of Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science’s Outstanding Research Faculty Award.
Saha earned his bachelor’s degree in agriculture from Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya, India, and further pursued his master’s degree in soil science at Punjab Agricultural University in India and earned his Ph.D. in soil science and biogeochemistry at Penn State University.
The University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture is comprised of the Herbert College of Agriculture, UT College of Veterinary Medicine, UT AgResearch, and UT Extension. Through its land-grant mission of teaching, research and outreach, the Institute touches lives and provides Real. Life. Solutions. to Tennesseans and beyond. utia.tennessee.edu.