Fresh Faces in CEA Spaces: Moein Moosavi-Nezhad
May 28, 2024 
In June 2025, Moein Moosavi-Nezhad, a graduate student finishing his Ph.D. in strawberry propagation at North Carolina State University (NC State), received the 2025 American Society for Horticulture Science (ASHS) Outstanding Graduate Horticulture Student Award for his academic achievements, research, and service. During his time at NC State, Moosavi-Nezhad has helped advance academic research and practical applications for CEA strawberries and vegetables. Below is an interview we conducted with the ASHS award-winner last spring.
Moein Moosavi-Nezhad
CEAg World: What first interested you in horticulture, then later, CEA?
Moosavi-Nezhad: “Since I grew up on a farm, I was always interested in agriculture. Even in elementary school, I remember writing an essay about how I wanted to work in agriculture, but I didn’t yet know about horticulture or CEA.
“When I started my Master’s, I took courses in hydroponics and CEA, and I became really interested in those techniques. Later on, for my thesis, I started working on the healing and acclimatization of grafted watermelon seedlings under different LED light qualities. The traditional technique for healing these newly grafted seedlings in tunnels wasn’t ideal, and we started healing them in a controlled chamber with LED lights. It resulted in a 100% success rate for grafting, which was substantial.”
What made you focus on strawberry propagation specifically?
“In my home country, strawberry propagation suffers from low efficiency – not many daughter plants are produced from each mother plant. Later on, I realized the situation in the United States is exactly the same, and the propagation efficiency is low in open-field nurseries for strawberries. When I met my Ph.D. advisor, his lab and another lab at NC State led by Dr. Mark Hoffmann were already working on a USDA grant to increase propagation efficiency. Because of my background in CEA, they hired me to start working on the project.”
Moosavi-Nezhad’s Current Experiment With Spectrum Lighting | Photo: Moein Moosavi-Nezhad
Can you tell us about what you’re working on now?
“I’m working on different light characteristics – such as photoperiod, intensity, and spectrum. With photoperiod, we’ve been able to increase the yield of daughter plants per mother plant by almost 20%.”
What would you say is your biggest accomplishment so far?
“I’m really proud to be completing my doctoral work here at NC State. We have one of the top CEA programs in the nation and among the best in the world. It is an honor to be a part of this group.“
Where do you see CEA going in the future?
“There’s so much potential with CEA in urban horticulture. Considering urban population growth, I think in the future, smart cities should be able to feed themselves and not be reliant on food produced in open fields and transported from far away.
“The carbon cost of this type of system also doesn’t match our reality with climate change and increasing resource scarcity. We need to shift the production of some food products such as leafy greens to these types of systems, where we can also have water use efficiency of up to 90%. The land formerly used for leafy greens, for example, could be used to grow other important crops.”