Meri Lynn Whitaker

Meri Lynn Whitaker, 51, died on Oct. 8, 2009, at her home on St. Thomas.

She was born on Dec. 25, 1957, in Dallas, Texas. Meri attended Pella Community High School in Pella, Iowa. As the teenaged 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 was a graduate of 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 ICRISAT's headquarters in Hyderabad, India.

She worked primarily with millet farmers at the edge of the desert in Rajasthan. Later, Meri worked at the Social Research Center at 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 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.

Meri is survived by her husband of 32 years, Steve Goode; her daughter and son-in-law, Carey and Frank Galdo of St. Thomas; her parents, Richard and Anita Whitaker of Knoxville, Iowa; her sisters and brother, Sheri (Dave) Krumm, Lori (Mike) Thomas, and Rick (Kim) Whitaker; and other relatives and many friends.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday at UVI's Administration and Conference Center.

The family requests that in lieu of flowers that donations be sent to Friends School in Ramallah, Palestine, or to Oxfam International.

- Obituary submitted by the family.