WWW.BRIANPOWELL.INFOMicrobiologist Haley Oliver started out at the University of Wyoming as an agriculture communications major, but she quickly found the field “too arbitrary.”
“I decided there were too many correct answers for some of the questions,” she says. Microbiology, on the other hand, felt like a perfect fit. “It was the hardest class I’d ever taken, and I loved it,” she recalls.
Knowing she wanted to go into food microbiology, she took on an undergraduate research project in the lab of Wyoming molecular biologist Kurt Miller, who studies the food-borne pathogen Listeria. At the same time, Oliver became a teaching assistant for a meat-evaluation course that assembled teams of students to travel to intercollegiate meat-judging competitions and assess the type and quality of beef, pork, and lamb from cuts of meat and whole carcasses. Though it was a bit far afield from her work on Listeria, Oliver soon ...
