Stella Melugin Coakley serves full-time as an Associate Dean in the College of Agricultural Sciences ; as a result, she is not supervising graduate students or teaching at this time. She is, however, willing to serve on graduate committees where the research area is related to her area of expertise.

Research Area

Relation between climate variation and plant disease epidemics; global climate change.

Description of Research

Quantifying the relationship between climatic variation and the development of plant disease facilitates control of disease under field conditions. The long-term goal of this research has been to develop a general method for quantifying how climate variation affects a particular disease. This research considers both past and possible future effects of long-term climatic variation on disease occurrence. Current research focuses on the biology of the Septoria diseases that are increasing in their importance as limiting factors to wheat production.