Arlene Haffa is a Professor in the Department of Biology & Chemistry at California State University Monterey Bay. She is broadly trained as a scientist and has written peer-reviewed manuscripts in a wide variety of disciplines. Her first publication was as an undergraduate attending the University of Wisconsin Madison where she studied lipoprotein turnover in dogs.  She spent one year as an analytical chemist in an EPA lab in Annapolis, MD and then returned to Madison to earn a Masters in Veterinary Science.  She did biomedical research at both the Veterinary and Medical Schools for a number of years at the nexus of cancer, obesity, and immunology, and later on osteoporosis.  After relocating to Phoenix, AZ she earned her doctorate at Arizona State University where she used laser physics to study electron transfer in photosynthetic bacteria.  Her postdoctoral studies were done at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) in Moss Landing.  She taught in the chemistry department at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh for 4 years before joining the faculty at CSU Monterey Bay. Her current research explores on-farm management practices with the goal of making agriculture more sustainable, where sustainability includes ecological, economic and social aspects. She also has published in science education as she works to iterate and improve her teaching.