CU professor Helene R. Dillard named Cooperative Extension associate director

By Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.

Helene R. Dillard has been named an associate director of Cornell Cooperative Extension. She will focus her attention on agricultural issues and on programs in the university's New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

A Cornell professor of plant pathology at the university's New York State Agriculture Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y., Dillard has served as chair of the station's plant pathology department since 1997. She will continue her plant pathology research effort while serving part-time in the extension position.

She joined Cornell in 1984 as an assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 1990. She became a full professor in 1998. Dillard earned her bachelor's degree (biology of natural resources,1977) from the University of California-Berkeley. She earned both her master's degree (soil science, 1979) and her doctorate (plant pathology, 1984) from the University of California-Davis.

Her research focuses on fungal and bacterial pathogens of vegetable crops, seeking key factors that promote disease development and areas in which the plant-disease cycle can be interrupted. Her interests include plant disease epidemiology and management of plant pathogens in conventional, transitional and organic cropping systems. In her plant pathology extension work, she has distributed educational information on the etiology, epidemiology and control of fungal and bacterial diseases of vegetables and developed integrated and sustainable management strategies.

She is a member of the American Phytopathological Society, North American Sclerotinia Workers, the Bean Improvement Cooperative, Epsilon Sigma Phi, the New York State Association of County Agricultural Agents and other professional organizations.

In 1996, Dillard traveled on a scientific exchange in China as part of a group of Cornell scientists examining the biological control of vegetable pests. In 1993, she participated in the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development program, in which she helped to determine pest-management needs of small landholders in Zimbabwe. In 1992, she won the Excellence in Extension award given by the American Phytopathological Society.