Almost back to the academic year. The Iowa State Fair is in full swing. Final vacation sprints are underway. Football is in the air, including Iowa State in Ireland! And next week, students will begin moving in to campus residence halls and apartments.
Please consider attending two upcoming events to celebrate the start of the school year:
CALS faculty and staff ice cream social, Aug. 29, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on the Harl Commons patio
CALS Alumni BBQ, Aug. 30, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Hansen Agriculture Student Learning Center
Last fall, our incoming freshmen and transfer class was up by an amazing 14%. This fall, we anticipate sustaining that level of incoming students. That's a great thing. It's still too early to say what our graduate student numbers will look like, but we do know the number of grants we receive to fund graduate student positions is down, given changes in federal programming. We hope that'll loosen up, and recent requests for proposals point in that direction. Please dig deep on those opportunities, and if you have any questions, please reach out to Danny Singh as your CALS associate dean for research and discovery, and graduate programs.
Have a great week, and let me know what you're thinking. My best, Dan
Scenes from CALS
Last week, I had the great pleasure of reconnecting with a terrific and important mentor of mine, Dr. E.A. “Short” Heinrichs, now an active emeritus professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He took me in from 1991-1993 while in Cote d’Ivoire, West Africa, at what is now the CGIAR AfricaRice Center (formerly WARDA, West Africa Rice Development Association), where he was a research leader. He involved me in a country-wide integrated study of upland rice productivity and management in shifting cultivation systems, and in West Africa region-wide surveys of insects in rice in multiple environments. Short is by any measure one of the premier and most impactful rice entomologists ever, and just the most kind and wonderful person you can imagine! His career after training at UNL and Kansas State took him to more than 80 countries, including years long stays in Brazil, India, the Philippines and Cote d’Ivoire, and service at Louisiana State University, University of Tennessee and Virginia Tech. I hope all of you have had, and have, such wonderful mentors who turned into true friends!Tom Brumm, professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering, shared these images and information from his recent summer adventure: I took some personal days to go on a gorilla trek at the beginning of my Uganda service learning trip. With a good friend from graduate school days who also works in Africa, we traveled to Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in southwest Uganda, near the borders of Rwanda and Congo. Only about 1,200 mountain gorillas are left in the world, with 500 or so in Bwindi. Tourism revenue to view gorillas habituated to humans supports conservation and village projects, significantly reducing poaching. Day one was a one-hour hike to a family well-habituated to humans. We got to observe them for an hour. Day two was a two-hour hike to help the rangers habituate a family of 10 gorillas. I was charged twice by the dominant male (32 years old, ~500 lbs) I was observing in the picture, who didn’t like me being there. As instructed, I didn’t run and was very submissive. It took a good while for my heart rate to decrease. What an experience! What glorious and impressive animals!
Earlier this month, Joel Rybolt, systems analyst for ITS in CALS, took a couple caterpillar pictures. The one above is a zoomed in picture of a tiny monarch caterpillar. It is smaller than a grain of rice. You can see the plant details in the picture to see how small it is. The other, below, is a green caterpillar on a globe amaranth flower. He took these photos around his house in Ankeny.
