Oak Spring Garden Foundation Announces 2025 Plant Science & Plant Conservation Sabbatical Awardees
OSGF
The Oak Spring Garden Foundation is pleased to announce that 3 individuals have been awarded the 2025 Oak Spring Plant Science and Plant Conservation Sabbatical.
The goal of this award is to provide advanced graduate students, post-docs, faculty or established scientists working in plant science and plant conservation, with an extended a stay of two to three months on the Oak Spring estate to undertake independent writing and thinking, away from the day-to-day demands of their other responsibilities. Awardees receive access to a private, self-contained, and well-appointed house on the Oak Spring estate and a $15,000 individual grant.
To learn more about each of the artists and their work, read below.
Summer Sabbatical: Aleya Fraser
Aleya Fraser (she/her) is a farmer, writer, and ethnobotanist who works on the documentation of traditional wisdom. She first visited Oak Spring in 2018 as co-chair of the Chesapeake Foodshed Network’s Community Ownership, Empowerment and Prosperity (COEP) Action Team. She and a team of 11 others spent three days at Oak Spring developing the COEP’s blueprint for the region’s food system, a document which has been used regionally and nationally by funders and food systems operators to guide their principles and practices. She will use the time time during her sabbatical to work on her current book project. You can learn more about her work by subscriber to her page on Substack.
Fall Sabbatical: Professor Vincent Savolainen
Vincent Savolainen (he/him) is Professor of Organismic Biology, and Founder and Director of the Georgina Mace Centre for the Living Planet at Imperial College London. His current research explores the role of plant-fungal symbioses in underpinning plant diversity. During his sabbatical, Professor Savolainen plans to focus on writing papers and grants related to this research, as well as an exploration of future innovative biodiversity conservation efforts at Oak Spring. You can learn more about Professor Savolainen here.
Winter Sabbatical: Scott Brainard
Scott Brainard (he/him) is a plant breeder and USDA-AFRI Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
