Campus Interview: February 2-4, 2009
Biography: Dr. Bill Boggess is Interim Dean of the College of Agricultural Sciences at OSU and also continues to serve in his previous position as Executive Associate Dean for the College. He has responsibility for leadership for all College programs including the management of an $85 million annual budget. Prior to being appointed Executive Associate Dean, Dr. Boggess was an Associate Dean for the College. Dr. Boggess served as Head of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at OSU before entering administrative roles at the College level. Before coming to OSU, he was a Professor in the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Florida. His training was at Iowa State University. Dr. Boggess' research interest is in the areas of riparian restoration, salmon restoration, water quality, allocation of conservation funds, and interactions among urban development, land use regulations and public finance.
Campus Interview: February 11-13, 2009
Biography: Dr. Steven Lommel is Interim Associate Dean for Research in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Assistant Vice-Chancellor for Research and Graduate Programs at North Carolina State University. His responsibilities include leadership for research programs in the College and co-responsibility for a $120 million annual budget. He played a leadership role in establishing the new North Carolina Research Campus, a facility involving 16 public institutions. He was previously Assistant Director of the North Carolina Agricultural Research Service, where he had responsibility for managing the operations of the large experiment station network in that state. Dr. Lommel also serves as a Distinguished Professor of Plant Pathology and Genetics at NCSU. He previously served as an Assistant Professor of Plant Pathology at Kansas State University, and he has studied at the University of San Francisco and the University of California at Berkeley. His primary research interest is in the areas of plant virology, virus structure and virus nanotechnology. This research has involved viruses that attack a wide range of crops, including wheat, potato, corn, sorghum, oats, clover and container nursery crops.
Campus Interview: February 16-18, 2009
Biography: Dr. Craig Beyrouty is Head of the Agronomy Department at Purdue University. He administers a large department that includes 51 faculty, 70 support staff and 250 students representing a highly diverse range of interests including fundamental and applied aspects of agronomic and horticultural crop production, corn and soybean breeding and genomics, and climatology, watershed hydrology, biogeochemistry, and applied soil fertility, among others. He serves on several statewide agricultural advisory boards and administers the Purdue Agronomy Farm, the Turfgrass Research and Extension Center, and the Purdue Crop Diagnostic Training and Research Center. Dr. Beyrouty was previously the Interim Dean of Enrollment Services at the University of Arkansas. He also served as Interim Head of the Department of Agronomy at the University of Arkansas. His academic training was at California State Polytechnic University and Purdue University. Dr. Beyrouty's research interests have included plant root traits for improving drought resistance and nutrient uptake, mineral nutrition of tilled and non-tilled agricultural soils, mechanisms to reduce ammonium fertilizer transformation and volatilization, growth and physiology of roots of plants such as wheat, bermudagrass, rice and soybean, and amelioration of contaminated soils, and methods for improving graduate and undergraduate education.
Campus Interview: February 18-20, 2009
Biography: Dr. Gregory Bohach is Director of the Idaho Agricultural Experiment Station and Associate Dean for the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Idaho. He also serves as Director of the Idaho Center for Host-Pathogen Interaction Research. His responsibilities include coordination of research activities and communications with commodity groups such as the potato, barley, wheat, canola, pea and lentil, dairy, beef and woolgrower's commissions and associations, and with state and federal legislators and federal agencies. He recently served as chair for the Western Association of Agricultural Experiment Station Directors. Dr. Bohach was previously the Head of the Department of Microbiology, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Idaho, and he serves as a Professor in the University of Washington¹s WWAMI medical education consortium for the five northwest states of WA, WY, AL, MT, ID. He studied at West Virginia University and the University of Minnesota. Dr. Bohach's primary research interests are in the areas of nanobiology, microbial toxins in bovine mastitis, bio-defense and emerging infectious diseases, bacterial kidney diseases of salmonids, molecular basis of host-pathogen interactions, and the safety and shelf life of agricultural commodities.
Campus Interview:February 23-25, 2009
Biography: Dr. Sonny Ramaswamy is Director of Agricultural Research Programs and Associate Dean of the College of Agriculture at Purdue University. His responsibilities include leadership for research programs and coordination between research and extension programs in agriculture, food and natural resources for on-campus departments and research centers, eight regional research centers, and additional research farms. Dr. Ramaswamy administers an $80 million annual budget. He was previously the Head of the Entomology Department at Kansas State University, where he also held the position of University Distinguished Professor. Dr. Ramaswamy previously also served as a Professor of Entomology at Mississippi State University and has studied at Michigan State University, Rutgers University, and the University of Agricultural Sciences in India. He developed and continues a research and outreach program that addresses the reproductive biology of insects, including chemical ecology, plant-insect interactions, and egg development.
This fundamental and applied research has focused upon a variety of insect pests of wheat (including grain storage pests), cotton, beans and other row crops, and trees.
