The Prestage Department of Poultry Science will welcome Frank Siewerdt as the new department head on May 1. Siewerdt was selected after a nationwide search.
“I am proud to join CALS and the Prestage Department of Poultry Science, who have a long legacy of distinguished service to the people of North Carolina,” Siewerdt says.
Originally from Pelotas, Brazil, Siewerdt is an accomplished geneticist who has established an extensive career spanning industry, academia and government. He recently served as a national program leader in the Division of Animal Systems of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s Institute of Food Production and Sustainability. His responsibilities included overseeing competitive research programs such as Welfare of Agricultural Animals; Animal Breeding, Genetics, and Genomics; and the Meat and Poultry Processing Expansion Program.
Siewerdt worked as a research geneticist at Perdue Foods and later joined Cobb-Vantress (a Tyson Foods subsidiary), rising from operations geneticist to senior director of genetics. In academia, he was a faculty member in quantitative genetics and biostatistics at the University of Maryland and in statistics and animal genetics at the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil. He also spent one year in Rome, Italy, as a livestock genetics officer in the the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
“We are excited to have Frank Siewerdt join CALS as head of the Prestage Department of Poultry Science,” CALS Interim Dean John Dole says. “He brings a wealth of experience from his diverse roles in industry, government and academia to help lead the department and the state’s largest industry forward.”
Siewerdt says he is eager to return to NC State as a department head, rekindle friendships from his time as a Ph.D. student here and cultivate new relationships as part of the campus community.
In addition to a Ph.D. in genetics and statistics at NC State, Siewerdt earned a B.S. in agronomy and an M.S. in animal genetics and statistics at the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil and an MBA at the University of Arkansas.
As a U.S. Chess Federation candidate master and avid power-walker who’s completed three full-length marathons, Siewerdt will undoubtedly bring strategic thinking and tenacity to one of the nation’s top poultry science departments, Dole says.
Siewerdt plans to foster a culture of excellence and altruism in the department, invest in early-career faculty and students through mentoring and creating professional development opportunities, and explore creative solutions to provide additional resources to the world-class senior faculty of the department.
“It is always about the people,” he says. “We need to take ownership of preparing the next generation of leaders to deal with uncertainty and ever-increasing technical and societal complexities in the production of animal protein.”
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