Skip to main content
Disaster Recovery Portal 
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences

Dean’s Corner

News from Dean Garey Fox

A Message from Dean Fox

July 25, 2025

The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) at NC State University is aware of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) recent reorganization announcement. While it’s too soon to fully understand the scope or impact of these changes, we look forward to learning more as the details emerge.

Like USDA, we are deeply committed to strengthening agriculture and supporting rural communities. Agriculture is vital to North Carolina — both economically and culturally — and CALS remains focused on delivering research-based guidance and resources that help our state’s farmers, families and rural communities thrive.

With a statewide network of 101 local Extension centers, 22 research stations and field labs, and over 1,000 world-class faculty and staff, CALS is proud to deliver real-world solutions that generate more than $2 billion in annual impact across the state.

As more information becomes available, we look forward to exploring new opportunities to partner with USDA in support of our shared mission: advancing North Carolina agriculture and those who depend on it.

Expedition Extension

Expedition Extension is a statewide tour where Dean Fox visits all 101 local Extension centers plus the Plants for Human Health Institute in Kannapolis. The tour is amplifying how Extension transforms science into everyday solutions across our state.

“The county support that we get for Extension is so critical for what we want to be able to do,” said Dean Fox. “What happens at the ground level is the engine of our college, it’s the engine of our university.”

Explore Extension with Dean Fox
Dean fox and a county map of North Carolina

Meet Dean Fox

Garey Fox joined NC State in 2017 as a professor and head of the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at CALS. He has over 10 years of administrative experience and 20 years of academic experience in research, teaching and outreach focused on surface water and groundwater interaction related to water quantity and quality.

Fox’s research focuses on surface water and groundwater interaction with applications for stream bank erosion and failure, sediment and nutrient transport, and the design of vegetative filter strips and riparian buffers. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He has published approximately 150 peer-reviewed articles in several refereed journals and served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on grant-funded projects totaling over $27 million.

Fox was named the first editor-in-chief of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) journals, a position he held for four years. He served on the ASABE Board of Trustees from 2019-2022, was honored as an ASABE Fellow in 2020 and received the society’s presidential leadership citation the same year. He was recognized with ASABE’s James and Karen Gilley Academic Leadership Award in 2021.

Before joining NC State, Fox worked at Oklahoma State University as a professor and the Orville L. and Helen L. Buchanan Chair in Biosystems Engineering for the Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering. Concurrently, he was the director and Berry Endowed Professor at Oklahoma State’s Water Resources Center. He was previously a faculty member at the University of Mississippi.

Fox earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agricultural engineering from Texas A&M University and a doctorate in civil engineering from Colorado State University.