Dean's message
Dean Angela Bedard-Haughn reflects on the past year.
By Angela Bedard-HaughnThis has been an exciting year for the College of Agriculture and Bioresources!
Although we have had many retirements over the past couple of years, we have welcomed a few new faces over the last year and have several new faculty searches underway, so our readers can look forward to learning more about how we are growing our expertise to better serve our community in the months and years to come.
The recruitments underway include a cluster hire in the area of sustainable and digital agriculture. To help pique your interest, check out the feature on some of our current work in the article on digital agriculture.
Digital agriculture is an area where interdisciplinarity is essential, bringing together strengths in agriculture, engineering and computer science. The bridging of these disciplines is increasingly important in crop breeding as well, by integrating genotyping, digital phenotyping, and data mining techniques together to develop new breeding strategies, like you’ll read about in the article on ACTIVATE, a project funded by Genome Canada.
The college is also building on its interdisciplinary strengths in Food and Bioproducts Sciences, which has important crossovers into human health – check out the work of Morgan Fleming, one of our outstanding graduate students and recipient of the prestigious Vanier Scholarship, as well as the work looking at options for replacing animal fats with plant-based oils in processed meats.
Our scientists continue to push the boundaries of their disciplines, and are being recognized nationally and internationally, as you’ll see when you read about the work happening in the Poultry Centre.
Likewise, our alumni continue to impress and amaze us with the work they are doing in their communities, like Tyson Buyer (BSA'12, DVM'16) who has started a bovine reproduction centre, Hillary Kyplain (BScRRM'22) who’s a conservation coordinator at Métis-Nation Saskatchewan, and Mike Solohub (BSc'88, BSA'92, MSc'97) and Colleen Christensen (BSA'93, PhD'99) who have enjoyed successful careers with their AgBio backgrounds and are already planning on how they can give back to the college.
The AgBio community is filled with enthusiastic, passionate people – Agknowledge is a way for us to share the stories of our students, faculty, staff, and alumni and the impact they are having, locally and globally. I sincerely hope that you enjoy reading these stories as much as we enjoy having all of you as part of our community!