���ϳԹ���

Many people’s lives are shaped by their college experiences. From the people they met, to the classes they took, to part-time jobs they had.

For Gary and Terry Lemme, “a couple of humble farm kids that came to the big school,” their South Dakota State University experience shaped their lives in multiple, incredible ways. The most influential way was, of course, meeting each other in Hansen Hall, like many other agriculture students at the time. The second most influential experience was the research projects both took part in as undergrads, which led to two incredible research careers.

Terry Lemme was raised on a family farm near Yankton. During her time as an undergraduate, she was approached by Robert Pengra, one of the most influential microbiology professors in SDSU history, to help with observing and recording the growth of bacteria on plant roots. Through this work, she became very interested in the relationship between bacteria and the plants they grow on. She went on to earn a master’s degree on the topic under Pengra and a doctoral degree under Robert Todd in soil microbiology, analyzing microbial activity in soil under different tillage systems and the genetic variability of soil bacteria. All three degrees came from SDSU.

After graduation, Terry Lemme went on to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service and was part of the team that mapped the poultry genome, the first domesticated animal to be genetically mapped. She also worked in private industry and for a hospital looking at genetic linkages to diseases.

“She had a very exciting career,” Gary Lemme said. “It all started as an undergraduate. Dr. Pengra seeing some potential and challenging her to do some independent research.”

While Terry Lemme, the more “academically inclined” of the two, according to her husband, had thought about going to graduate school before her research experience, Gary Lemme planned to graduate with his bachelor’s degree in agricultural education and go into teaching. That changed when he was looking for a summer job and found one with Fred Weston, a professor in the Department of Plant Science (now Agronomy, Horticulture and Plant Science), working on the emerging technology of satellite mapping. By attaching scanners to the bellies of planes flying into Ellsworth Air Force Base, they were able to get simulated satellite data, proving that valuable imagery could be collected from the air.

“Based on that work, I noticed that wheat, for example, growing on the sandy soils had a different electronic spectral signature than wheat grown on heavier soils,” said Gary Lemme, originally from Kiester, Minnesota. “So that's what I studied for my master's degree, the influence of soils upon the spectral signature of crops as observed by the satellites. It all goes back to just looking for a summer job.”

Gary Lemme received his master’s in agronomy in 1975 before pursuing a Ph.D. in agronomy from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He returned to SDSU as a faculty member, earning the College of Agriculture and Biological Sciences’ Teacher of the Year award in 1986. He went on to hold administrative roles for Michigan State University and the University of Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station before once again returning to SDSU, this time as dean of the College of Agriculture and Biological Sciences (now the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences). His next step was to lead extension efforts throughout Alabama as the director of the Alabama Cooperative Extension System. He still holds the title of Extension Director Emeritus at Auburn University.

While their impressive careers may not have followed the research tracks they began on as undergrads, both Gary and Terry Lemme still carried what they had learned in that first research experience with them.

“The thing we both learned as undergraduates was that you can use research to solve everyday problems,” Gary Lemme said. “That's what's unique about a land-grant university. It brings together fundamental research with an applied component that answers today's questions and creates tomorrow's opportunities. Those are the principles that we learned as undergraduates and were able to carry through our careers.”

The Lemmes want today’s undergraduate students to have the same chance to experience and be inspired by research. In the early 2000s, they started an endowment to fund research projects within the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences that are proposed by undergraduate students on a topic of their choosing alongside a faculty member. The Lemmes hope by supporting these students, they could be developing tomorrow’s scientists and faculty members, but even for students who don’t end up going into a scientific career, they still gain valuable life skills.

“It's a matter of giving students an experience that'll help them, and if they want to be a scientist, fine. If not, it helps them be critical thinkers, which is a skill that will serve them no matter what profession they become involved in,” Gary Lemme said. “It's part of giving students a wide spectrum of experiences. It's more than just a classroom, more than a laboratory or a field. It's through internships, it's through undergraduate research experiences, study abroad experiences, those pull together to provide a comprehensive education and opportunities that you don't find at many universities.”

Thanks to support from the Lemmes and others, in the last 25 years more than 100 undergraduate students have had their proposals funded and been able to lead a real and impactful research project. The students have represented every department and academic unit within the college and have shared their research at national and local conferences, published in peer-reviewed journals and gained invaluable new skills they took with them in their careers.

The impact of the research conducted with the Lemmes’ support and the careers they’ve helped build are hard to measure. When asked about it, Gary Lemme explained that he’s following a lesson his parents taught him: Always say thank you.

“SDSU has done an awful lot for Terry and I,” he said. “We would have never met each other. We would have had very, very different lives if it hadn't been for SDSU and some of the experiences that we had beyond the classroom. This is a little bit of us saying thank you to SDSU. We've been very blessed to be part of SDSU and have SDSU as part of our lives.”