A Fond Farewell from Dean Ahmedna

Dear faculty, staff and students,

As I step down as your Dean, for personal reasons, I reflect with pride on what we have accomplished, and our national prominence as a top college of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences in the land-grant system. Let me thank each and every one of you for the dedication and excellent work that have propelled our college to that prominence.

My work as Dean, working alongside all of you, has been a great privilege and honor.  I absolutely love my job, my college and my university, and our state. I am also very proud of what we have accomplished together in the last 5 years, despite COVID and many other challenges, to consolidate our position as a top performing college in all mission areas. Here are some highlights.

• Student enrollment remained steady and picked up this year to reach 1,119 students, with graduate enrollment growing by 16% this year, more than any other college.
• Funded research numbers have nearly doubled in the last five years to reach nearly $40 million this year.
• Faculty are publishing more high impact factor papers than ever, filing patents, and winning excellence awards.
• Advancement fundraising increased five-fold to reach $2.3 million last year.
• Our academic program is boosted by the record-breaking $18.1 million NextGen grant we secured this year for student success, benefiting all academic departments in the college.
• We secured the long sought-after 1:1 state match for our college, and we succeeded in getting a 2:1 match in this year’s budget. This means that more than $15 million per year of extra funding will be available to our research and Cooperative Extension divisions, allowing us to increase the breadth and depth of our programs and ensure higher impacts on the state and nation.
• We succeeded in reclassifying all Cooperative Extension specialists as faculty for the first time in our college’s history, allowing them to earn rank promotion and engage in all mission areas, as our academic and research faculty do.
• We introduced faculty and staff recognition awards and research incentives to celebrate success and reward productivity.
• We have added six tenure-track faculty positions and several non-tenure track faculty positions that will reduce teaching load as we transition to R1 status.
• We successfully launched a Ph.D. program with strong enrollment, exceeding the initial target of 25 students, as well as other new graduate programs and certificates.
• We significantly increased student support funds to more than $2 million per year, through scholarships and research stipends.
• We embarked on multiple initiatives to enhance our facilities, including:
  • Completed dozens of lab renovations in all our buildings on campus
  • Doubled our research space in Kannapolis
• Won $5.1 million in funding from the National Institute of Health to renovate our vivarium, and received a more-than-matching contribution from the university to complete the project.
• Extended infrastructure at the farm, including the Urban Food Complex, the Pavilion and the Student and Community Farm.
• Secured university support for the new research space in the Gateway campus, with 12 labs, supporting faculty offices, and space for staff and students.
• Ensured, for the first time in our history, that all our buildings are handicap accessible, with new elevators for Carver Hall and Benbow Hall, and have redundant power to protect research sample loss.
• Transformed our farm into a “smart” farm, with a robotic milking system, drone lab, tech devices on animals and precision ag-enabled equipment, and a soon-to-start “precision-ag site” in collaboration with John Deere, SAS, Microsoft, and other partners.
• Worked with the university to ensure that replacing Carver Hall remains a top priority and that its replacement is included in Phase 1 of the University Master Plan.

Beyond funds and infrastructure, we also delivered expanded Extension programing, enhanced our partnerships and support groups, and engaged in strong advocacy, yielding results such as securing the state match. Our Ag Communications division has been extremely effective in promoting our brand locally and nationally, while our IT support team continues to make our system the best-managed on campus, with their focus on efficiency and safety.

Dean Ahmedna acknowledges the crowd upon his return to the CAES in 2018.

Overall, I leave the Dean’s role very happy knowing that we are in a much better place than we were when I started with you five years ago. However, I started from where other leaders left off. So, thank you to those who preceded me for their contributions.

I am confident that you will continue the momentum and build on our unprecedented success to reach new heights, and pull the university to its R1 destination. No doubt, we have the talents, energy, and resources to be on top of that R1 mountain.

So, I thank you individually for your leadership, hard work and dedication to our college and the communities we serve. I count on you to keep the momentum of growth and drive to excellence going. The CAES’s future is bright and that will be your legacy. So, press on.

I want to thank our faculty, staff, and students for their dedication to excellence and their outstanding work. I thank the entire college leadership team – associate deans, chairs, directors, and unit heads – for working with me as a team to lead their respective units and bringing the college to its current level of excellence. I also thank the university leadership, Chancellor Martin and Provost-Smith-Jackson, for their trust and support, and the rest of the cabinet for their support. I thank my fellow deans for their friendship and collaborative spirit.

My sincere thanks and gratitude go to our partners, without whom we would not be where we are today: advisory board members, Commissioner Troxler and his team at the N.C. Dept. Of Agriculture and Consumer Services, NC Farm Bureau, NC Grange, NC Agribusiness Council, our state and federal legislators, alumni, corporate partners, commodity organizations and state and federal agencies that support our mission areas.

I will always be part of the CAES Aggie family and look forward to contributing in other ways.

Aggie Pride!