Alex Liebman is pursing a Ph.D. in agroecology in the Applied Plant Sciences program within the Department of Horticultural Sciences. He received a B.A. in biology from Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota in 2012. He uses the lens of agroecology — in its biological, political, and economic dimensions — to explore nutrient cycling in agroecosystems and its relation to food sovereignty and ecological conservation. By employing a variety of laboratory and conceptual methods, he researches aboveground-belowground relationships in agroecosystems and their implications for nutrient cycling. He is currently working on a project quantifying the contribution of leguminous cover crops to soil organic matter pool. In fall 2016 he will be researching the effects of pasture diversification in grazed agroforestry systems on soil carbon in Colombia as a U.S. Borlaug Global Food Security Fellow. Lastly, he is developing an interdisciplinary component to his work that studies how agro-ecological processes and farmer livelihoods are linked to the political ecology of land-use. He specifically wants to explore the ways in which agronomic research is practiced, how scientific knowledge about agriculture is disseminated, and how historical and ideological trends shape the questions agronomic research asks today.