AGRO Fellow Awards

Pat Havens is an Exposure Assessment Leader and Corteva Laureate in the Environmental Safety Group at Corteva Agriscience, in Indianapolis, Indiana. He holds a BES from the Johns Hopkins University and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in Chemical Engineering. In 1990, Pat joined the Dow Chemical Company, a Corteva predecessor company. Since then, he has become an internationally-recognized expert in the environmental chemistry and risk assessment of crop protection products. He has extensive experience in the generation, synthesis, and interpretation of environmental fate and hazard data in support of the regulation and stewardship of agricultural chemical.

His key interests lie at the technical and policy interface of risk management and compliance with the Endangered Species Act. Pat’s multi-decadal involvement with AGRO has evolved from technical presentations to co-organizer of multiple symposia and leadership positions in the Division to multiple terms on the AGRO Executive and Communications committees. As the lead for the e-communications for AGRO, he has strongly contributed to publicizing the benefits of AGRO to the wider scientific community, as well as keeping symposium organizers and presenters on task in meeting submission deadlines and posting daily updates during national meetings, thus helping to ensure the smooth running of AGRO programming. During the COVID pandemic years, he worked closely with the divisional program chairs in developing virtual programming, helping maintain AGRO member interest when engagement was its most challenging. Pat also has been active in AGRO student outreach programs and continues to mentor new symposium organizers and actively solicits non-traditional contributors to AGRO programming. 

Edmund Norris a Research Chemist and Entomologist, working at the Center for Medical, Agricultural, and Veterinary Entomology of the USDA-Agricultural Research Service in Gainesville, Florida. Edmund received his PhD in Entomology and Toxicology from Iowa State University in 2018. For his dissertation, he explored the ability of plant compounds to enhance a variety of synthetic insecticides against mosquitoes, but he also focused more broadly on natural product chemistry and the mechanisms by which natural plant compounds affect the physiology of medical and veterinary pest insects. He did his post-doctoral research at the University of Florida, exploring the neurophysiological effects of natural products on various arthropods.

In his current role with the USDA, Edmund is interested in the development of novel repellents and insecticidal formulations that may circumvent insecticide resistance, while primarily focusing on natural products as his inspiration. His research focuses on better understanding the mechanisms of novel insecticidal, repellent, and synergistic agents using a variety of electrophysiological, pharmacological, and biochemical techniques. Edmund just finished a single-year active membership on the Executive Committee as an interim member, filling in for another member who stepped into another role. Edmund has served the ACS Agrochemicals Division by co-organizing 8 symposia, one of which led to the publication of an ACS Symposium Series book, served as the AGRO website coordinator for over a year, served as an Executive Committee Member (2022 – 2024), served as an expert judge in a variety of AGRO competitions (student posters, New Investigator Award, and AGRO Ambassador Program), helped coordinate events at the AGRO 50th Anniversary Celebration, and participated in the 2023 Strategic Planning Retreat as a co-chair. He has also focused on co-organizing Early Career Professional symposia to promote the participation of new members in the society. He hopes that his perspective as a new scientist will be valuable in planning events that encourage the next generation of chemists to play a more active role in our Division.

Amy Ritter is the leader of Waterborne Environmental Inc.’s Risk Assessment team. She holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Purdue University and an M.S. in Civil Engineering from Colorado State University. She has over 30 years of experience in fate and transport modeling of chemicals and risk assessment. She has pioneered procedures for conducting probabilistic risk assessments and for simulating pesticide fate and transport associated with rice agriculture in the United States, Europe, Japan, and China and banana agriculture in Costa Rica. She was the lead investigator on several industry-wide working groups including the FIFRA Exposure Model Validation Task Force.

Amy’s career has seen her working in the office, the field, and the classroom. She has served as a hearing expert to the Work Group that prepared two scientific opinions on the FOCUS groundwater report and has participated as an instructor in Risk Assessment workshops sponsored by IUPAC in China, Colombia, Chile, and Costa Rica.

Amy has been an active and dedicated member of the AGRO Division for over 20 years. She has shown her commitment to AGRO through her leadership roles and participation in committees and conferences. She served on the Executive Committee from 2014 through 2023. In 2016, Amy attended the ACS Leadership Institute in Dallas, TX as the AGRO Division representative. Additionally, she participated in AGRO’s Strategic Planning in 2017 in DC. Over the years, she has been a co-organizer for over ten symposia for the ACS Fall Conference and has co-authored over 20 presentations. In her spare time, Amy is an avid traveler and nature enthusiast who has visited seven continents.

Thomas Sparks is a life-long ACS AGRO member (47 years) beginning as a graduate student at UC Riverside where he received his Ph.D. in Entomology (1978) in insect physiology and toxicology under Dr. Bruce Hammock. From 1978-1989, Tom was a professor in the Department of Entomology at Louisiana State University conducting research in insecticide biochemistry, toxicology and resistance. He left academia in 1989 to explore insecticide discovery at Eli Lilly and Co., which successively became DowElanco, Dow AgroSciences, and Corteva Agriscience. For the next 30 years Tom was involved in the exploration, discovery, and development of new crop protection compounds for insect management, including the natural product insecticide, spinosad (launched 1997), and was a co-inventor of the next generation spinosyn insecticide, spinetoram (launched 2007). Both compounds received the Presidential EPA Green Chemistry Award (1999, 2008). As a Research Fellow in Corteva Agriscience, he was also engaged in numerous other discovery projects, including the sulfoximines which gave rise to sulfoxaflor (launched 2013). Tom retired from Corteva in 2019 continuing to write and consult as an independent consultant (Agrilucent LLC) and to serve on editorial boards for Pest Management Science and Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology. He remains active in AGRO from which he has also received several awards (International, Innovation, Spencer, Sterling Hendricks Memorial Lectureship). Throughout his career Tom has maintained an interest in sharing his research and ideas which he continues to do with (thus far) 165 referred journal articles / book chapters (plus 32 others) and is a co-inventor on over 50 patents

Past Awardees