I am sorry for being remiss in bringing everyone up to date on the changing face of the Department. All four of our tenure-track faculty searches this year have been successfully completed.

Many of you have seen Brian Briggeman walking around Waters Hall. He works here now. Brian is the new Director of the Arthur Capper Cooperative Center. He is assessing the activities of the Center and will be bringing his own perspective to future teaching, research, and outreach programing. He is also working closely with David Barton, Seleise Barrett, and Chuck Mickelsen in continuing many of the fine programs initiated under David’s tutelage as Director of the Center since its 1984 inception.

Two new faculty will be joining the Department next week. Both Nathan Hendricks and Mykel Tayor will be enjoying the pleasures of driving across the Great Basin, the Rockies, and the Great Plains in August as they roll into Manhattan from Davis and from Pullman, respectively. Nathan will focus on the interface of natural resource use, agricultural development, and production agriculture in his research/teaching appointment. He will be teaching AGEC 315 in the fall.  Mykel will continue some of her marketing and production work from Washington State, but will focus on commercial agriculture, primarily crop production, in her Extension/research appointment here at Kansas State.

Finally, Alex Shanoyan has accepted the offered position in agribusiness. He plans to complete his dissertation at Michigan State University in December and join the Department in early January of 2012. Although final class assignments will await an evaluation by the agribusiness faculty of our undergraduate and graduate programs in agribusiness, preliminary plans are for Alex to hit the ground running by teaching AGEC 599 and AGEC 890 in the spring semester. Given the success of our students in recent agribusiness Case Study competitions and our growing reputation for preparing future and current (through the MAB program) professionals for careers in agribusiness, there is a perceived demand for again offering AGEC 890, a course that has not been taught for several years.

This will be an exciting year for the Department with this influx of new faculty bringing proven teaching, research, and extension expertise to our programs.

I would especially like to thank all of you who served on the search committees for these four positions.  We had a number of excellent candidates for all four.  The committees identified the best candidates and suggested invitations for campus interviews be extended to provide a great pool from which Brian, Nathan, Mykel, and Alex were finally selected.  Special thanks also go to Judy Maberry for her extraordinary efforts in managing the information flows from the start to the conclusion of each search.  Although search procedures at Kansas State have changed substantially this year, she adapted quickly to the changes and made sure that all of us followed the procedures more or less correctly.