University Place  Kathryn VandenBosch Strategic Planning in the College of Agriculture  UP853 March 27, 2013    cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. It's your chance to experience science as exploring the unknown here at your land-grant research university. Tonight I'm delighted to be able to introduce to you Dean Kate VandenBosch. She is the new dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and that is the college here at UW-Madison that puts the land grant in the university. It's a remarkable organization. I happened to get my PhD from it in 1985, but I haven't worked for the college since then, but I'm pretty proud to be associated with an institution that does basic research, such as in genetics here in this building, biochemistry, microbiology. 

It also does the traditional agricultural with horticulture, agronomy, soil, dairy science, animal science. But it has some remarkable range of other departments that study fields such as rural sociology, life science communication, landscape architecture. And I think that's one of the things that's got to be an interesting challenge for the new deans, how do you guide a college that is as diverse as this is, as remarkable as the University of Wisconsin is, and to sustain the tradition of public service and public scholarship that is one of the hallmarks of this university in general, and certainly your college in specific. Tonight, we get to hear about one of the tough things, and that is how do you grow the future. And I'm looking forward to hearing what Dean VandenBosch has to say. She is originally from Michigan. She studied at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and got her BS and... >> MS and PhD. >> MS and PhD, excuse me. From there, she's a plant geneticist. 

She postdoc'd both here at UW-Madison and the John Innes Institute. Then she went to Texas A&M University for 12 years. For many years she was at the University of Minnesota. And now, in the last year or so, she's come to UW-Madison to serve as the new dean here for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Would you please join me in welcoming Kate VandenBosch to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]  >> Well, thank you, Tom. It's a pleasure to be here. That was quite a good introduction. I thought I should start off by telling you a bit about myself, and he told a lot of the story, but I'll tell a little bit more, including I have some pictures here from my early development as a plant biologist, including this one up here in the left-hand corner where you see me sitting at an electron microscope. That was during my postdoc here in the mid-'80s. 

And I think when I was here, I was inoculated with something because years later I found this homing desire, a desire to come back here, and I'll tell you a little bit about that. But in my early career, I worked primarily on plant development and plant cell biology, interactions of plants with microbes, both the friendly and the unfriendly. And then in later years, after these pictures were taken, I got into the area of plant genomics and related topics. And this gives a pictorial story to what Tom already told you. I grew up in central part of the lower peninsula in Michigan. Went to Kalamazoo College, a small liberal arts college there. Graduate work at the University of Massachusetts, and then here as a postdoc. Then to England for a couple of years where I did a second postdoc before going to Texas A&M and then to the University of Minnesota. And, actually, there are a couple of themes going on here. One was that all of my training was in the basic life sciences and liberal arts, but all of my adult life, except for the couple of years in the UK, has been at land-grant institutions. 

So the first one was Massachusetts, and then here, and Texas A&M and Minnesota. They're all the land-grant institutions for their various states. And that really made a mark on me. Even though I started as a basic scientist, as a plant scientist, the places where that really flourishes are at land-grant institutions. And also, there's this great continuum of basic research all the way to applications and communication of new knowledge to the public, something that I have really come to love. And while I was at Minnesota, I got to be interested in how this kind of university functions and what we need to do to keep it flourishing and keep serving the public for the years to come. And that, plus this homing instinct, have brought me here for this particular opportunity, and I recently completed my first year as dean. So, here's the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, a picture that I really like because it shows the past and the present. What you see here is Hiram Smith Hall, which is the home to life sciences communication, and it is reflected in the beautiful new microbial sciences building. About a half dozen years old now. 

So, we see here our past and our contemporary sense and a site of where a lot of our forward-thinking work is going on as well. So, our college, we're proud to say, is a leader in all aspects of its mission, research, education and training, and outreach. And the challenge today is, how do we keep ourselves vigorous? How do we address challenges as they emerge? How do we interpret the land-grant mission for the 21st century? And that is what it has got at work at today in planning for our future. I'll give you a little bit of some highlights about where we are today. Tom mentioned many of the disciplines that we cover here in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, or CALS as we like to call it, from basic science to applied life sciences, many aspects of social sciences that impact rural development, community development, and the economics of our disciplines. So, 19 departments currently. We have about 4,000 students in total. About three-quarters of them are undergraduates, and one-quarter are graduate students. Plus we have a large number of people that come to us for short courses or a variety of types of professional training that might be short in duration, as well as postdocs and many others. And here we have the degrees that we awarded two years ago. 

These numbers have been climbing. Our faculty is currently numbering in about 260 individuals. Many of them highly accomplished, including 18 members of the National Academy of Sciences. And about a quarter or so of our faculty have joined appointments with Cooperative Extension, and they're very much involved in their educational activity of educating the public and less so with students on campus. So, how do we position CALS for future success? Well, we have created a hypothesis that what we really need to do is to position ourselves at the overlap between the two circles that you see here. On the left are grand challenges. These are the great societal challenges of the day and those that we envision that will be arising during this century. And the one on the right really represents our strengths or our competitive advantages. And we think that we need to identify this overlap spot where we have great strengths that will allow us to address the big challenges of the future. So, we've initiated a strategic positioning effort for the college to address these and other questions. 

So, we're not the only ones thinking about the grand challenges facing our disciplines, the places where we can really make an impact. The USDA is thinking about that. The National Science Foundation, NIH, our major funding institutions are. Also, there was just a report of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology addressing several issues. One is on training students in our science disciplines. There's been a similar report on how to advance agriculture in the coming decades. And the National Academy of Sciences has also recently undertaken an effort to see where biology is going in the 21st century and how it can be, how the recent advances with all the tools that we have in basic science can be applied to some of these grant challenges. So we've been using these as resources as well as other sources. Well, I think that this figure really puts a lot of this in context. If there's one factor that creates a lot of challenge and has a lot of impact on the need for our expertise, it's the growing human population. 

And although this is a cartoon, it is absolutely to scale and shows what an unprecedented situation we find ourselves in. For most of human history, we had a slow growth in the population until the industrial revolution, and then more recently really fast growth projected through this century. And although we don't really know what this top point will be, a lot of experts say we will probably level off around about this point. Around nine or 10 billion people. We're currently at seven. And we've never had this many people on the Earth, and it creates a lot of new challenges. First and foremost, increased demand for the products of the Earth. Food, energy, fiber, other renewable materials, and non-renewable materials. And from the standpoint of agriculture when we think about this, in the 20th century, we had phenomenal success at increasing production, but that was with not only advances in genetics, but a lot of input, irrigation, fertilizer, and so on, and bringing more land into cultivation. But now we don't really have the capacity to expand the areas that are farmed, and we're worried about environmental quality and sustainability. 

So the solutions that we had in the last century are not going to be effective for this century in boosting our production. In addition, we have a changing climate, and in ways that's not entirely predictable. So that's bringing new challenges, volatile weather patterns. Last year it was drought. We also have seen more strong storms. So, the fact that we have limited natural resources and a changing climate really makes it even more challenging to meet the demands of a growing world population. We also have changing health challenges, many that have been with us, but just as we have the current seven billion, we've got a hundred billion hungry people, we also have about a hundred people estimated that would be obese or quite overweight. So, with that over-nutrition comes a lot of health challenges. We have different communicable diseases also arising, some of them related to animal health as well. And, of course, all of these things impact the health of communities and society and relate to issues even such as national security. 

So, I think you'd agree that these are all really very, very urgent. And so, I guess it's good news for us that we have new tools, growing knowledge base to address these kinds of questions, and I think, for those of us in CALS, we're not going to run out of work to do any time soon.  So, in addition to the need for our expertise to address these challenges, there's also the need to train the new generation to enter the workforce and to think creatively about problem solving, in some cases for problems that we haven't yet learned how to articulate, emerging issues that we don't understand yet. So we have to train the next generation to be creative thinkers, critical thinkers, problem solvers, so that they will be contributing to addressing these issues. So, we have a need for a plan for the college going forward, and to segue from the comments I was just making about training the next generation, locally here we have a changing enrollment. So, this shows the change in percent enrollment in CALS in the red line, maybe you can't see the color, but it's the line that's sloping up there. And overall you see that UW Madison has stayed roughly the same size, increased over the last decade of a couple percent. Whereas in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, we've seen a dramatic growth especially in the last five years, and this seems to be continuing up and not plateauing. Our graduate enrollment has been pretty stable at about 900-950 students or so pursuing Masters and PhD degrees. So, we're really thrilled about the interests of students in our areas, and we need to think carefully about how we can respond to this dramatic uptick in the interest in our programs. 

We can look at this on the background of our capacity to train students based on the number of faculty that we have. And here again, you see the dark red line, this time it's falling down. So this is percent change in the CALS faculty where we have seen a loss of faculty positions. So, over, this is a 30-year period, we've had a loss of about 30% of our faculty numbers. UW as a whole has varied, but, right now, UW as a whole is about where it was 25 to 30 years ago. So, we have increasing interest in our programs. We have to train students to be creative thinkers. And there are other issues around education that we're thinking about too. On the left here we see our current interim chancellor, David Ward, who has encouraged us to think big, to set our sights high, and he's also encouraged us to be creative in what we're thinking about in terms of the way that we train students. And an interesting quote from him is that we need to be thinking more about 16th century methods than 20th century methods. 

And that seems counterintuitive, but what he is saying is that we really need to be able to work with students in small groups to coach them, to get them to work in groups. So, for example, one of the innovations that we are all talking about is the flipped classroom. The flipped classroom refers to the fact that students in this kind of a training environment listen to lectures at home with material online, and then they come to class to do their homework. So it's flipped. Instead of coming to class to hear the lecture, they hear that at home, and they do the homework while they're in class. Well, not just homework but problem sets, collaborative work, and so on. So, this is just one of the types of innovations that we're thinking about. And, of course, we're thinking about how to effectively use electronic delivery of information to give students more access or just to be able to provide them with the best tools for learning. So, where are we today? Well, some of our teaching isn't very contemporary or isn't very forward-thinking. You see here on the left is a classroom, a lecture hall in Ag Hall, right up at the other end of Henry Mall here, and this is the largest lecture room on campus. 

So that's 20th century style. And on the right, you see a fermentation lab in the new microbiology building. One of the types of settings that allows students to work in small groups, hands-on, project-based learning. So we do the whole gamut of types of instructional activities. And we need to be thinking carefully about the best way to train students, and what's the best mix of all these kinds of approaches for different types of learners. So, we have assembled a team of about 18 folks, mostly inside the college, a mix of faculty, students, and staff and a couple of members of the CALS Board of Visitors. And those are Susan Crane, is our current president of the CALS Board of Visitors. She works for WE Energies in Milwaukee, and she is a dairy farmer. And also Bill Oemichen, down here, our past president who works with cooperative businesses around the state and around the region. And we've been working since September on this task. 

So, one of the major approaches we've used is to get a lot of feedback from a lot of different people in different roles, faculty and staff, students, members of our stakeholder groups that interact with us a lot, members of the legislature and others. So, we have interpreted our mission in a new way. That's our new mission statement here. For the college, our goal is to advance and share knowledge, discover solutions, and promote opportunities in food, agriculture, bioenergy, health, human well-being, and the environment. So, advancing in shared knowledge to us means everything from basic science, understanding basic mechanisms, to the applications. Sharing knowledge refers to not only Extension but also our educational mission inside the university and beyond its walls. Our vision is to lead in science, innovation, and collaboration that improves life and sustains the natural world. And collaboration, I think, is a really important part of this. One of the emerging themes that came from all of our consultation and from all of the homework we did in reading of resources, the main point is the importance of interacting across disciplines to come up with creative solutions to these great grand challenges, we need to bring lots of different types of expertise together. Also, we hear from students frequently that they want to have diverse types of training. 

Students like to collect majors. I think the most I've heard of is four. Or they may like to have, also, certificates in different areas or create custom areas of study. So, I think this is important not just to be responsive to their interests but also in creating this new generation of creative individuals who have training and expertise from diverse areas. And so, attacking problems in a collaborative way is going to be, and is today already, an important tool that we have in meeting those challenges. Now, we have a tag line, growing the future. You saw that in my first slide, my title slide, and I really like this because we are constantly thinking of a future focus, the challenges that we have, and how we are growing to meet that, including the growth of human potential. So, one of the things that I asked our group to do is to identify some priority themes, themes of research areas that will be a priority for us going forward, but not only for research but also for training. And so we have six of those, six of these, and they're a work in progress, but I'll introduce them to you. The first is to enhance food systems. 

And by food systems, what we mean is the whole process of producing food from the field to the fork, from a local scale to a global scale. So it not only refers to raising crops and food animals but also how food is processed, how it is transported, how it is available to people, and even the waste management. So this is a really very big topic. And there are many contemporary aspects of this that are new challenges. So, for example, getting appropriate food to urban areas. Today, we find that there are urban areas that lack access to balanced diet, fresh foods in particular. Urban agriculture is an emerging area, and it's one that we are making some of our first forays into. So, the goal here is that an effective food system is one that would ensure not only an abundant and affordable source of food, but it also has to be accessible, safe, secure in that it's reliable year to year, sustainable, nutritious, and delicious. So this is a really big order. What we see here in the slides are a worker in, this is Babcock Hall's master cheesemaker, Gary Grossen, up here. 

This is Bill Tracy, who is the chair of agronomy and a sweetcorn breeder in the field. These are some students working at Bucky's Butchery, processing some meats. And here is a school lunch. So this is a topic with many facets. Another theme is continuing to improve human health. And not only fighting disease but maintaining healthfulness. This is a long topic of, it has a rich history in CALS, dating back to vitamin D research early on and continuing to the present day. That's the chemical symbol that you see along the left is vitamin D. And, today, we work hard at understanding the mechanisms of disease to enable development of new treatment methods. We have special expertise in metabolic diseases, including diabetes and obesity related areas. 

We have commitment to understanding nutrients in food and how they contribute to health, with the idea that in the future we will have more personalized diets and functional foods, nutraceuticals and the like. And another aspect relates not only to human health but animal health and how these areas intersect, especially diseases that can have a reservoir in animal populations and cross over into humans. A third area that is a newer emphasis is bioenergy. Probably, I'll bet that this group has, in the past, had an opportunity to hear about bioenergy research that happens on campus. We're very proud of the advances that we're making here, particularly in the area of using biomass or plant materials and waste materials to create new energy sources. And this is something that really sent us back to the drawing board because, of course, we've raised, as humans, we've raised crops for millennia for consumption and for fiber. We've used them for energy in the sense of burning them, but to be able to create crops that we will harvest energy from to produce, for example, a liquid fuel that you can burn in your car or use for other purposes is new. And this sent us back to learn new things about how plants make biomass as well as how microbes can help degrade it and turn it into new things. Not only energy is important, but using renewable sources, such as biomass, is another objective is to create new products from those materials. And we're also looking at animal waste and parts of animals that we don't consume, that we don't eat, for creating new bioproducts that will influence health and for other uses. 

 Fostering healthy ecosystems is really important, obviously. Our ecosystems provide us with a lot. Not only products, but what we call ecosystem services, such as cleaning water, managing floods, as wildlife habitat, recreation, and so on. And sometimes these different objectives for using a landscape come into conflict. Competing demands of this sort are going to become even more intense as the population continues to grow. So, our goal, really, is to go beyond conservation, beyond sustaining current environmental quality towards a more resilient future. And the goal is that we need to understand the interactions among all of these functions and also create new inventive technologies that will foster innovative management systems for ecosystems as well as appropriate policies and economic opportunities.  I think we're up to the fifth one now, and that is related to climate change. Our goals here are to mitigate the effects of climate change and also to adapt to them. We anticipate that this is going to become an increasingly important theme in the coming decades and that we need to find a way to have robust solutions to erratic weather patterns and general warming of the climate. 

The kinds of problems that we expect to deal with are extreme weather events, drought in some cases, warming temperatures, but also changes in interactions among organisms with new pests and pathogens coming into our area. So these are our many challenges, and we're already at work on these areas. Finally, as a life scientist, sometimes I have to be reminded to not forget the social sciences, but we also have to be thinking about how all of these areas impact our community health and economic development. We need to ensure healthy local economies and prosperous stable communities, and this requires understanding both their internal dynamics and the nature of their interactions with national and global systems. So, this kind of understanding is the foundation for good policy advice at community, state, and national levels.  So, the next steps, we still have quite a bit of work to do. A next step will be beginning to implement these ideas in the college. One of the very next steps will be to have our academic programs and departments map their current activities to our priority themes. And we are now undertaking planning for our educational mission. What programs we want to grow, new opportunities, and, of course, new innovative approaches to training students. 

So, why does all of this matter? Well, we want to inspire the next generation of citizens and scientists. We want to ensure a healthier future for our ecosystems and for humans and the planet in general by our science and by training this next generation of problem solvers. And we think that solutions are best identified by cooperation and collaboration. We need to ensure that our structure and the way we use our resources best allows for that and even encourages creativity. So, by being purposeful in planning, we are all pulling in the same direction. So, I want to thank you for your attention this afternoon. I've been very pleased to be here, and thanks for listening to my talk. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]