Charlotte grew up on the beach in Denmark playing in the waves, fishing, and climbing trees. She fell in love with the natural world early on and knew she wanted to spend the rest of her life understanding and exploring it. The ocean is the wildest place in Northern Europe, where most of the land is heavily managed. Her earliest jobs were working on farms helping with cropping and livestock health and through high school she explored agriculture and forestry further. Before going to College she traveled around Europe and Asia and ended up spending a year in Australia WWOOFing. Unable to shake the travel bug, Charlotte arrived in Washington State in her twenties in the last year of her BS in Agronomy. She enrolled in a MS in Agronomy in Denmark and came back to the University of Idaho to do research on how bacteria and fungi degrade toxic pesticides in water and soil. This evolved into a PhD at the University of Minnesota exploring how bacteria degrade Atrazine in soil and how plants might be used to remediate contaminated soils. After teaching at Southern Utah University for several years she arrived at Sterling College in 2009 to lead the Sustainable Agricultural team. Charlotte teaches a variety of classes at Sterling, from Agroforestry to Soils, Plants and Microbes. She also loves to take students around the world to infect them with the travel bug that she still has. She leads trips to: Chiapas, Mexico, to look at agroforestry in action; The Bahamas and Belize, to explore the ocean that she loves; and back home to Scandinavia, to explore new solutions to community living. Three years ago Charlotte was hired as the Director of the newly formed Rian Fried Center, wherein she supervised the farm, the kitchen and the curriculum in the center. She and her team members created the School of the New American Farmstead that now serves as the continuing education program at Sterling. Current areas of interests continues to be the ocean and the forest— through coral research and agroforestry implementations, in the hopes of finding a place where the trees might just save the ocean and all of us.

Profile

Award	Institution
PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology	University of Minnesota
MS in Agronomy	The Royal Veterinarian and Agricultural University
BS in Agronomy	The Royal Veterinarian and Agricultural University

Presentations
http://digital.vpr.net/post/vermonts-third-hemp-growing-season-more-acreage-new-products#stream/0

Publications
Nir Shapir, Charlotte Pedersen, Omer Gil, Lisa Strong, Jennifer Seffernick, Michael J. Sadowsky, Lawrence P. Wackett “TrzN from Arthrobacter aurescens TC1 is a Zinc Amidohydrolase” J. Bacteriol. 2006 188: 5859-5864.
Nir Shapir, Charlotte Rosendahl, Gilbert Johnson, Marco Andreina, Michael J. Sadowsky, Lawrence P. Wackett “Substrate Specificity and Colorimetric Assay for Recombinant TrzN Derived from Arthrobacter aurescens TC1” Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 2005. 71(5):2214-20
Lisa C. Strong, Charlotte Rosendahl, Gilbert Johnson, Michael J. Sadowsky, Lawrence P. Wackett “Arthrobacter aurescens TC1 Metabolizes Diverse s-Triazine Ring Compounds” Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 2002. 68: 5973-5980

Accomplishments

Awards
Agroforestry across the Curriculum – $3,000 – Work College Consortium 2018
Current Collaborator in the USDA NRCS
Regional Conservation Partnership Program grant entitled “Memphremagog Long-Term Water Quality Partnership.”

Teaching Experience
2009 – now: Sterling College; Classes taught: Biology and Lab; Soil Science:; Plant Science; Soil Fertility and Water Quality; Research in Tropical Ecosystems – Bahamas; Research in Tropical Ecosystems – Belize; Scandinavian Sustainable Systems; Climate Adaptations in Chiapas, Mexico; Whole Farm Planning; Agroforestry; Soils, Plants and Microbes I and II

2003-2009: Southern Utah University, General Biology I; Cellular and Molecular Biology; Intro to Microbiology; Biotechnology; Bioinformatics; Masters level courses – Forensic Biology; Forensic Biochemistry; Forensic DNA analysis

2003-1997: University of Minnesota; Intro to Biochemistry; Biochemistry for Dentist

Three Books You Recommend?

The Enchanted Braid: Coming to Terms with Nature on the Coral Reef, by Osha Gray Davidson
Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, by J Russell Smith
The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming, by Masanobu Fukuoka

Charlotte's Recent Blog Posts

What is Next for Chestnuts at Sterling College and in Vermont?

Posted January 15, 2021 by Charlotte Rosendahl read more