Born on December 25, 1957 in Dallas, Texas, she attended Pella Community High School in Pella, Iowa. As the teen-aged daughter of a biblical scholar, she also lived in Zahle, Lebanon and Amman, Jordan. As a college student, she became actively involved in advocacy groups seeking just solutions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned her Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Stanford University. At Stanford, Meri began focusing on the problems of environmental and economic sustainability for subsistence farmers in Third World countries. As a Fulbright Scholar, she studied how farmers in northwestern Syria make production decisions. In 1990, she joined the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, based at its headquarters in Hyderabad, India, and worked primarily with millet farmers at the edge of the desert in Rajasthan.
Meri Lynn Whitaker Dies at 51
Later, she worked at the Social Research Center at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. As a consultant to the World Bank, Meri evaluated farming operations in sub-Saharan Africa. From 2005 until her death, she served as director of the Virgin Islands Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (VI-EPSCoR) at the University of the Virgin Islands. The program focuses on marine and environmental studies in the Caribbean region, and had been awarded a five-year $11,500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation in September 2008.
She enjoyed gardening, cooking and traveling. Dr. Whitaker is survived by her husband of 32 years, Steve Goode; daughter and son-in-law: Carey and Frank Galdo of St. Thomas; parents: Richard and Anita Whitaker of Knoxville, Iowa; sisters and brother: Sheri (Dave) Krumm, Lori (Mike) Thomas, and Rick (Kim) Whitaker; as well as other relatives and many friends.
A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 17, at the University of the Virgin Islands Administration and Conference Center. The family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to the Friends School in Ramallah, Palestine, or to Oxfam International.