Letter from the vice president for research

Greetings from Kansas State University. It has been a beautiful fall on our campuses and both students and faculty are excited to be back on campus and in person. K-State’s research, discovery, innovation, scholarly and creative work is also back at full volume. Labs, classrooms, studios and field stations are back to full capacity and proposal activity and awards have returned to or exceeded pre-pandemic levels. There is a new energy at K-State with the arrival of our new president, the return to full on-campus operations and several exciting announcements during the past year. These include the Scorpion Biological Services Inc. facility, in addition to several other new corporate partnerships, the continued build-out of the Edge Collaboration District and the launch of K-State’s Game-changing Research Initiation Program, or GRIP.

I am pleased to share our latest issue of Seek, K-State’s award-winning research magazine, and invite you to learn more about the range of research activity taking place across the university and throughout Kansas. In this issue, we present extended features on our research in soils — across a range of colleges and disciplines — and in vaccine development — largely in our College of Veterinary Medicine, College of Arts and Sciences and Biosecurity Research Institute, or BRI. Research in both of these broad areas aligns directly with the priority areas identified in K-State’s Economic Prosperity Plan for Kansas: food and agriculture systems innovation, digital agriculture and advanced analytics, and biosecurity and biodefense.

We also present extended features on global resilience — topics ranging from political resilience to food and energy resilience — as well as pet food and pet nutrition, including work at the Hill’s Pet Health and Nutrition Center in our College of Veterinary Medicine and at K-State’s renowned grain science and industry program in the College of Agriculture. These topics also connect to our Economic Prosperity Plan, both in the food and agriculture systems innovation and the K-State 105 thrust areas.

Also included are shorter features highlighting several of our researchers themselves, including our most recent early career grant recipients from the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy, a university distinguished professor, a graduate student and an undergraduate student. It’s our talented people who are doing this remarkable work for our state, the nation and the world.

Finally, we include an engagement feature on the work we are starting in partnership with Scorpion following its announcement of plans to construct its new $650 million, 500,000-square-foot biodefense-focused large molecule and biologics biomanufacturing facility in Manhattan.

This is an exciting time at K-State, one of the nation’s premier land-grant and public research universities, as we work together to advance and accelerate research, seek to expand our transdisciplinary research portfolio, build new and exciting corporate partnerships and create meaningful connections between research and discovery and the communities we serve and support.

As always — on behalf of the Office of the Vice President for Research, K-State and all the faculty, staff and students driving our research, discovery and innovation — thank you for your interest, your support and your engagement with K-State.

David V. Rosowsky, Ph.D.
Vice President for Research