Emily Lavely

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Emily is the Tree Fruit Educator for the West Central region and is based in the Oceana County Extension Office in Hart, MI. She works with other MSU educators, industry partners, and stakeholders, and her work is primarily focused in West Central and at the West Michigan Research Station. Emily supports the tree fruit industry by providing educational programming for horticulture and pest management topics related to rootstock and variety evaluations for fresh market and processing, irrigation scheduling, and management strategies for fire blight, cherry leaf spot, and spotted wing drosophila.
Emily grew up in northeastern Indiana. She attended Purdue University as an undergraduate student where she studied plant genetics and plant breeding for small grain crops. She attended Penn State University to earn a master’s degree where she worked on black root rot in strawberry. She earned her PhD at Penn State in horticulture where she worked with apples and focused on root development and root-microbe interactions. Before coming to Michigan State Extension, she did postdoctoral research with Penn State to understand how the spotted lanternfly affected health of forest trees is Southeast Pennsylvania.