The Department of Animal & Poultry Sciences
and the Department of dairy science,
which both reside within
the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
will come together to
create a School of Animal Sciences.
It brings to bear more investigators
in one academic unit.
It increases our curriculum.
It increases the degree option for students.
But what it really does is
once we come together,
you take all of those individuals that are
interested in a particular species
and you create a critical mass.
For example, there are
dairy scientists in animal poultry science.
There are also
dairy scientists in dairy science.
And all of a sudden, when you
put those groups together,
you create the largest set
of dairy centric faculty in the country.
When people think of
Animal Sciences and programs,
they think of raising cows or milking
cows, or raising pigs, etc..
And while we do teach
those valuable hands-on experiences,
some of the faculty that we have in both of
those departments do pretty
fundamental research.
And that fundamental research
not only has human applications,
but those kinds of translational information
also help us to raise this livestock better.
So we take that basic fundamental information
that we're creating
about the biological system.
And we translate that into
applied practical uses for our stakeholders.
We deal with the animal,
but we also are concerned
about human health and well-being.
And we can marry those two together.
And we can create information
about the human condition,
but also do it in
the same vein to
increase of production efficiency of animals.
We're surrounded by facilities
that handle beef
cattle, that handle equine,
that handle sheep and pigs.
What students get is hands-on experience
on what it's like
should be responsible for those livestock,
what it takes to keep them going,
what it takes to keep them healthy.
The other thing that
students get is
a curriculum that's
pretty large and complex.
In other words, they get to design
their own educational career objectives.
If they're interested in beef
cattle or in dairy,
they can take a litany of
courses that's about that particular species.
When we come together as a school,
we rank sixth in the nation
in terms of research dollars.
That's really impressive because
you're comparing it against
sister institutions in the middle of
the Midwest and the middle of
animal agriculture,
huge agriculturaly-centric universities.
And for Virginia Tech be able to
compete at that level, it's just phenomenal.
So one of the things that
the creation of the school does is it
automatically gives Virginia Tech notoriety in
the animal sciences discipline,
because now all of a
sudden they see us ranked among the very top
in the country.
We're really proud of the history
of both of the departments.
We have almost 125 years
of history in both of these departments.
We're not going to throw that away.
We want to add to that.
And we want to grow that.
We're gonna be progressive in the way we
look at animal sciences and how it
can contribute to the health
and well-being of the human race.