Private Giving
Penn State Intercom......October 31, 2002

Couple endows career
development professorship

Earl Casida, professor emeritus of microbiology, and his wife, Veronica, have given $250,000 to endow the Lester Earl and Veronica Casida Career Development Professorship for Food Safety in the College of Agricultural Sciences.

Catherine Cutter, assistant professor of food science, has been named the first Casida professor.

Cutter holds bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Connecticut and a doctoral degree from Clemson University. She joined Penn State as an assistant professor in 1999. Cutter's teaching and research focuses on food microbiology with an emphasis on food safety issues as they pertain to meat and poultry. She chairs the Food Safety Impact Group in the college's Department of Food Science, which promotes research and education that focuses on the microbial ecology of foods, detection methods and the control of food borne pathogens to prevent food borne disease. Cutter's teaching responsibilities include cooperative extension programs for food processors in Pennsylvania.

Earl Casida earned his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in bacteriology from the University of Wisconsin in the early 1950s. Before joining the Penn State faculty in 1957, he worked for Abbott Laboratories, Pabst Laboratories and Charles Pfizer and Co., where he developed and patented the first commercial fermentation process in the production of L-lysine, an amino acid required in human and animal nutrition. At the University, his teaching and research focused on soil microbial ecology and industrial microbiology.

Previous philanthropy from the Casidas to Penn State includes a graduate fellowship in microbial food safety in the Department of Food Science, an undergraduate scholarship in the College of Agricultural Sciences and a Renaissance scholarship for financially needy students.

The gift is part of the University's Grand Destiny campaign, a seven-year effort to raise $1.3 billion in private support to strengthen the University's mission of teaching, research and service. The campaign is scheduled to end June 30.

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