>> 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]