October 23, 2015
SoAR Foundation announces Scientific Advisory Committee Assembled to Strengthen Agricultural Research
Submitted by Communications and Marketing
Charles Rice, university distinguished professor of soil microbiology, has been selected to serve on the Scientific Advisory Committee for Supporters of Agricultural Research, or SoAR, Foundation. The committee is an eight-member panel with the mission to strengthen agricultural research and raise its profile within the broader science community.
The Science Advisory Committee will focus on several goals: increasing the participation of the nation's leading research institutions in Agriculture and Food Research Initiative and in the field of agricultural research; identifying additional opportunities for collaboration and cross-disciplinary work between agricultural research programs and other federally funded science programs; and providing advice and recommendations for advancing agricultural research as a whole.
"The green revolution of the 1950s and 1960s set the bar for a fruitful era of scientific progress," said William Danforth, chancellor emeritus of Washington University in St. Louis and chairman of SoAR Foundation. "Given the many problems confronting farms and food production today—including changing growing seasons, threats from new pests and diseases, and feeding a rapidly growing world— we need the next revolution to start today. Food is too important for the human race to be a research after-thought; it needs to be a high priority for the nation's entire scientific community."
Rice also is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and chair of the Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.