Ben Quint ’27: A research path worth mapping

Agriculture wasn’t on Ben’s radar at all until he was rejected from a high school STEM program. He figured he might as well try the ag program they referred him to, and there, the future unlocked.

“I found that agriculture has everything that I love. Everything is so interdisciplinary—you can learn everything at the same time, and that’s how I like to learn, without having to give anything up.”

Ben dove deep into agriculture after that. Senior year found him CALS-bound, and Ben took an early leap with his hands-on education through a research fellowship through the World Food Prize Foundation. Just three days after graduating high school, he found himself in Jonesboro, Arkansas, investigating rice methane mitigation.

Ben brought his research with him when he packed up for Ithaca. His boss connected him with an affiliated rice lab at Cornell, the Reid Research Group in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. Here, Ben traded soil samplers for pipettes. The work was valuable—yielding good friends and a helpful familiarity with R Studio—but he missed the rewarding exertion he found in the fields. 

“When you do that kind of work, you get home and you’re the good kind of tired,” Ben explained. 

He returned to “the good tired” the following summer with the Cornell Sustainable Cropping Systems Lab led by Matt Ryan. Back in the sun, Ben studied weed communities and cover-cropping with an enthusiastic team.   

Now, Ben’s hung up both his sunhat and lab coat—if only for the time being—for a new kind of research. In an extensive literature review, Ben explores the nutritional and environmental impacts of alternative proteins with a team in Food Systems and Global Change, a research group housed within Global Development. Clocking hours in Excel is a new research setting for him, but so is the enjoyably heightened demand for critical thinking.

“I enjoy that it’s all very speculative, it’s all very future-focused. When I do this kind of work, I feel like I’m at the forefront of something.”

The forefront of food is where Ben plans to stay, academia specifically. Ben holds reservations about working commercially with something people fundamentally rely on, and he finds the constant evolution of science captivating. “Academia is something that’s very new, always.”

There’s something assuring in the novelty. Spending forty-plus hours a week working on mitigation, Ben says, helps him feel less nervous about today’s colossal crises like climate change and food injustice.

“Doing something about [these problems], I don’t think I’m going to be the solution, but I feel like I’m putting in my two cents, and that makes me feel better about being on Earth.”

Ben’s motivation is bigger than self-assurance, and it’s something unique to agriculture. “Everyone has a connection to food. With this kind of research, you know you’re working with something people eat every day, and that means your work is very meaningful.”

Lauren Chuhta ’26 is a student writer and producer, as well as co-president of the Student Advisory Board in the Department of Global Development. She is a double major in Global Development and Communication in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell.