News

Published in the Center for Agro-Ecology Newsletter | December 1, 2025

Nancy Nunn was appointed the Interim Director of the Harry R. Hughes Center for Agro-Ecology. The announcement comes following the retirement of Executive Director Dr. Kate Everts in October. Nunn previously served as Interim Director prior to the hiring of Dr. Everts.

Nunn has played a key leadership role at the Hughes Center since 2007, having first served as the Center’s part-time development coordinator before moving on to serving as the communications and outreach coordinator and then assistant director in 2017. She was especially influential in shaping the Center’s engagement with state and local governments as they created Watershed Implementation Plans (WIPs) for the Chesapeake Bay clean-up, and has led the Center’s work in Maryland’s food system and food security areas. Since that time, she has served as the President of the Maryland Agriculture Council, as an Executive Committee member of the Delmarva Land and Litter Collaborative, and is a former co-chair of the state’s Food System Resiliency Council. She currently serves on the Governor’s Intergovernmental Commission for Agriculture. 

Nunn has also served as the lead on several recent grant initiatives, including work funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture and led by Penn State University in partnership with several other universities, including University of Maryland, on evaluating how to achieve a thriving agricultural system over the next several decades in a regional landscape that continues to urbanize. She also leads the Hughes Center’s Northeast SARE grant collaboration with the Agriculture Law Education Initiative (ALEI), which aims to increase the number of farmers in Maryland who accept payments via government supplemental food programs like SNAP and WIC. This both expands food access in vulnerable communities and also opens new direct markets for farmers.

Nunn also leads the Russell Brinsfield Internship Program for the Hughes Center, an internship conducted in partnership with the ALEI and is funded by the University of Maryland: Strategic Partnership: MPowering the State (MPower). Held each summer, the internship program engages students from UMCP’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law in Baltimore who work on projects addressing issues and research questions in Maryland’s agriculture and natural resources sectors.

A video about the Brinsfield Internship Program is available here: