Extension Faculty
Dr. Gurpal Toor
Dr. Toor has expertise in fertility and soil chemistry as well as water quality processes controlling nutrient fate and transport. He has projects examining cycling of dissolved organic nitrogen, refining and implementing the PMT, assessing soil health and enhancing soil organic carbon, manure management to balance phosphorus and sustain agriculture, N-cycling in commercial corn, and nutrient management for beef.
Extension Areas: Nutrient Management, Waste Management
Dr. Gary Felton (Recently Retired)
Dr. Felton’s expertise is in the general arena of Water Quality. This includes nutrient fate and transport and aspects of waste management. More specific topics and projects are Biosolids Management/Utilization, Poultry Litter Management, Turfgrass Education, and Urban Nutrient Management.
Under the umbrella of composting, Dr. Felton organizes and teaches Mid-Atlantic Better Composting School for commercial composting. He also teaches a Poultry Mortality Composting short course required for farmers, large animal composting (horses and cattle) and on the national front, some US Composting Council’s Compost Operators Training Courses, webinars for the USCC.
Dr. Felton wrote Maryland’s Urban Nutrient Management Implementation Plan (MDA, 1998) which sets the direction for Maryland in Urban Nutrient Management and the Maryland Professional lawn Care Manual (2013) published by MDA, as well as numerous Master Gardener classes on turf management and the Bay
Extension Areas: Nutrient Management, Composting, Waste Management
Mark Dubin
Mark is the Senior Agriculture Advisor to the EPA Chesapeake Bay Program Office. He addresses all aspects related to the agricultural sector, including research, data collection, data analysis, conservation practice implementation and verification, federal, state and private funding, and programmatic and policy instruments.
Some projects include development of new commercial poultry and swine production projects in Virginia and West Virginia in cooperation with Virginia Tech, state agencies, and corporate integrator companies to provide statistics on confined livestock nutrient generation and facility management, a project developing a partnership between USDA, USGS, EPA, and Pennsylvania to share agricultural BMP implementation data.
Extension Areas: Animal Systems, Waste Management, Nutrient Management
Dr. Amro Hassanein
Dr. Hassanein has experience in determining the effect of electrocoagulation on wastewater evaluating the anaerobic digestion performance on different types of bioplastic, improving biogas production of cassava wastewater using zeolite and biochar additives and manure co-digestion. He examined the impacts of biochar loaded with nickel and iron nanoparticles on hydrogen sulfide removal and investigated biogas enhancement and ammonia extraction to increase revenue in waste-to-energy systems.
Extension Areas: Anaerobic Digestion, Waste Management
Dr. Stephanie Lansing
Dr. Lansing is primarily a researcher, but she has significant efforts in Extension. Her work has increased the anaerobic digestion knowledge of government agencies, consultants, farm organizations and individual farmers.
Extension Areas: Anaerobic Digestion, Waste Management
Dr. Ray Weil
Dr. Weil is primarily a researcher, but he has significant efforts in Extension. He has provided increased understanding about cover crops in general and forage radishes in particular.
Extension Areas: Nutrient Management, Waste Management
