President Barack Obama has asked Roger Beachy, Ph.D., president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, to lead a new federal agency that will transform the way that plant science research is funded in the United States.
Beachy is the founding president of the Danforth Plant Science Center, a private, nonprofit research institute in St. Louis County founded in 1999 by a partnership that includes Washington University.
The National Institute of Food and Agriculture, or NIFA, a newly named agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, will manage the external grants of the Department of Agriculture, including the competitive grant program now called the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative.
In the past decade or so, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has distributed between $120 million and $180 million in competitive grants. "The goal we're aiming for in the next four or five years is an annual budget of $700 million," Beachy said.
"Plants are key to the future, to our survival," Beachy said. "But they just haven't been getting the attention they need from the research community or the U.S. public.
"We're beginning to see aberrations in climate, and the Earth's growing population will need not just more food but better food and will need to use less of the world's water supply so that the growing population will have what they require to live," Beachy said
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