The Department of Animal and Food Sciences’ land-grant mission encourages truly creative research endeavors that result in the discovery of new knowledge. The Department’s research activities will be focused on acquiring fundamental knowledge related to animal biology and management, animal and human nutrition, processing of food products and ensuring of their safety/security, and the interface of animal agriculture with the environment. The Department aspires to capitalize on the individual and collective achievement of our faculty by applying discoveries to the improvement of agriculture, industry, families, and communities at the state and national levels.
Most Significant Challenges
1. Infrastructure and facilities limit the potential for continued growth of research:
o Increasing operating costs and lack of adequate equipment funds hinder research capability and productivity. Our most successful research programs have insufficient equipment support for further expansion and development.
o Off-campus research facilities (farms) are not well maintained due to repeated state, university, and college budget cuts.
2. Repeated budget cuts have created key vacancies in both faculty and staff lines which pose real challenges to attain the top 20 status.
Strategies
1. Aggressively pursue funding opportunities and sources that support fundamental/applied research, particularly federal competitive and targeted initiative funds.
2. Identify opportunities for both intra- and extramural equipment funds and encourage faculty to apply to those programs.
3. Encourage faculty to include salary savings in federal grant submissions as an incentive to generate more extramural support.
4. Strengthen existing and develop new multi-disciplinary research programs that target funding opportunities available only to multi-university (institution) collaborations.
5. Continue to actively compile, document and communicate impacts of our research.
Key Indicators, by 2014 the Department will have:
1. Maintained the annual total external grant awards above $100,000 per research FTE.
2. Maintained at least 2 graduate students per research FTE.
3. Maintained at least four extramurally funded postdoctoral scholars/research associates.
4. Obtained at least two pieces of major equipment.
5. Increased patent submissions by 20%.
6. Maintained the number of refereed journal publications per research FTE above 3 per year.