Colleagues,
I’m looking forward to sharing a lot of great news and information this week during the State of AgriLife Address and Vice Chancellor’s Awards in Excellence. In the interest of keeping everyone informed, I wanted to share a short update on one of our initiatives within AgriLife Research, which all of you played an important role in advancing.
Last fall, I asked all of you to submit nominations for an interim director to operationalize a new Texas A&M AgriLife Research institute, which is driven by a planning grant from the USDA to create a research program focused on accelerating agriculture-based solutions to advance human, environmental, social and economic health. Through your nominations, we received several highly qualified candidates. Based on the input of the selection committee, we have appointed Dr. Jay Maddock from the Texas A&M School of Public Health to serve as interim director of the new Texas A&M AgriLife Institute for Advancing Health Through Agriculture (IHA) with the primary objective to officially launch this institute in 2021.
As noted by the selection committee, Dr. Jay Maddock has extensive administrative and leadership experience and has a significant publication record in the broad categories of health promotion and interventions in nutrition. He will be splitting his duties between IHA and his work with the School of Public Health, and he is eager to learn from our incredible team and use your talents to advance the Institute and publicly launch this exciting endeavor.
The IHA will play a critical role in bringing together the work that many of you already do to enhance human, environmental and economic health, resiliency, sustainability and prosperity across the Ag-Food-Health value chain.
I thank everyone across AgriLife who submitted a nomination for this position, and I thank the nominees for their time in being responsive as the selection committee conducted their interviews and analysis of candidates. Also, I sincerely thank the selection committee, composed of faculty and administrators who were charged with reviewing nominations and selecting the interim director. Their input was invaluable in this process.
I look forward to Dr. Maddock advancing the IHA to best serve our land grant mission and bring together the outstanding research that our faculty and researchers are already undertaking in this space to save lives and improve public health through agriculture.
Thank you,
Patrick J. Stover, Ph.D.
Vice Chancellor and Dean for Agriculture and Life Sciences
Director, Texas A&M AgriLife Research