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 Robin W. Morgan, who has served since July as acting dean of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, has been named dean of the college, effective July 1, acting Provost Dan Rich announced March 26.
Morgan, a molecular biologist and professor in the Department of Animal and Food Sciences, joined the UD faculty in 1985. Her research, which she conducts at the University’s Delaware Biotechnology Institute, centers on the virus that causes Marek’s disease in chickens.
“The College of Agriculture and Natural Resources can anticipate a very bright future under the leadership of Dean Robin Morgan,” Rich said in announcing the appointment, “and I look forward to continuing to work with her.”
He said the search committee, chaired by Engineering Dean Eric W. Kaler, recommended Morgan for the position based on “her strong qualifications as a scholar and teacher and her excellent contributions as acting dean—contributions that have earned the respect and admiration of colleagues across the University and beyond the campus.” The search committee also “made special mention of her open and direct style of communications, a quality that enhances her ability to work with the diverse internal and external constituencies that the college serves,” Rich said.
Morgan has served as acting dean since July, when Dean John Nye left the position and returned to the faculty. Nye has remained in his role as director of Cooperative Extension, a job he will continue through June.
“The time I spent as acting dean was critically important because it allowed me to experience the job firsthand,” Morgan said. “It gave me a look at the dean’s responsibilities and helped me determine some areas on which to focus immediately. It certainly will ease the transition.”
Among the priorities she noted for the college are selecting an associate dean to lead Cooperative Extension; enhancing the support for graduate programs, with a special emphasis on recruiting top students; continuing the significant contributions the college makes to the Delaware Biotechnology Institute (DBI); and increasing the number of named professors.
Morgan said she plans to launch a search as soon as possible to fill the associate dean’s position, adding that Cooperative Extension is an arm of the college that provides substantial outreach to the agricultural and broader community—in areas from farm management and youth programs to nutrient management and poultry health.
Of DBI, where a number of the college’s faculty members are affiliated researchers, Morgan cited the importance of cross-disciplinary work in the sciences.
“Some of the most exciting areas of research today involve more than one discipline,” she said. “It’s important to have that collaborative research, and the college is committed to ensuring the success of DBI’s program.”
The college itself, she said, is stronger than ever, with excellent students, faculty and programs that encompass far more than traditional agricultural subjects. And, with a relatively small undergraduate population of about 700, students and faculty tend to form close bonds, she said.
Morgan said her tenure as acting dean has enabled her to get to know the larger Delaware agricultural community, interacting with farmers, business people and policy makers in all three counties. “The opportunity to travel around the state and meet people in the community has been the best part of the past year,” she said. “I’ve met so many people who are so committed to agriculture and to the environmental sciences—and so willing to work hard—that it’s made me even more committed to supporting those efforts.”
Morgan said she plans to continue her research, working with “my excellent collaborators,” and, although she no longer is able to visit her lab daily, she stops by three or four times a week to oversee the progress of research. She said she has stopped teaching “except for a few guest lectures,” but continues to advise about 20 students.
“I enjoy teaching very much, and I miss the challenge of being in the classroom,” she said, “but you move on to other things and new challenges.”
Morgan is the first woman dean in a college that once was largely male but whose undergraduate student body today is more than 60 percent female. She said she often attends professional meetings at which she is one of only a handful of women—occasionally, she’s been the only woman—but that her gender rarely is an issue.
“I’ve found the community to be very accepting,” she said. “It’s not something I focus on, and I don’t think others do, either.”
Morgan also broke new ground in 1985, when she was the first molecular biologist to join the college, a program that has grown over the years. When she began doing research at UD, she recalled, Worrilow Hall then had no darkroom and certain other facilities she needed. In contrast, her lab today at DBI is “the nicest I’ve ever worked in,” she said.
Her research is focused on Marek’s disease virus, a herpesvirus that causes infectious T-cell lymphomas in chickens. In addition, since 1997, Morgan and Joan Burnside, professor of animal and food sciences, have been analyzing the chicken genome, identifying DNA sequences that represent genes expressed in chicken tissue and posting them to an online database to share with researchers around the world.
Before coming to UD, Morgan earned her doctoral degree in biology from Johns Hopkins University and completed postdoctoral work at the University of California at Berkeley.
In addition to Kaler, members of the search committee for the dean’s position were Robert Baker, Delaware Farm Bureau; John Boyer, E.I. du Pont Professor of Marine Biochemistry/Biophysics; Burnside; Judy Hough-Goldstein, chairperson of entomology and applied ecology; Tom Ilvento, chairperson of food and resource economics; Yan Jin, associate professor of plant and soil sciences; Ed Kee, instructor in plant and soil sciences and a Cooperative Extension specialist; and Ken Lomax, chairperson of bioresources engineering.
The College of Agriculture and Natural Resources includes about 700 undergraduate and 140 graduate students and approximately 70 full-time faculty members. It encompasses the departments of Animal and Food Sciences, Bioresources Engineering, Entomology and Applied Ecology, Food and Resource Economics and Plant and Soil Sciences.
Article by Ann Manser
Photo by Jon Cox
March 29, 2002
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