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Leadership

N.C. PSI Report: The Final Countdown

Adrian Percy
Adrian Percy

The NC State University Plant Sciences Building is nearing 100% completion, and we’re feverishly getting ready for a major event, to which you’re all invited: the building dedication ceremony, ribbon cutting, and tour, which starts on April 12 starting at 11:00 a.m. 

I personally want to thank our 150 generous donors – the many commodity groups, industry partners, legislators, alumni, and citizens of North Carolina – who came together and fulfilled our $160.2 million in fundraising goals. Thanks to you, our new headquarters, the NC State University Plant Sciences Building, has become a reality. 

Soon, the most important element of N.C. PSI, its talented multidisciplinary team of researchers, will be moving their furniture, equipment, and supplies from all points of the campus into their new N.C. PSI workspaces throughout spring and summer. 

For the first time, since N.C. PSI officially came into existence in 2014, we will have highly talented researchers across academia, government, and industry working together in one building designed for close collaboration and next-generation research. 

We have started a strategic planning process to guide us in this next phase of our initiative. We are working with Emergent Method, a consulting firm, to collect and review feedback from our team, as well as our various internal and external stakeholders. We will use this information to inform our future priorities and clearly define our path forward. Parallel to this process, we will also develop plans for each of N.C. PSI’s platforms. 

This entire strategic planning process should be finished by early fall, at which time we anticipate to have N.C. PSI’s additional platform director positions filled and some ambitious  goals in place that will challenge us to achieve our full potential. 

We are now at the point we have all been waiting for: the point where the fuel and engine combine to supercharge our agricultural research and innovation – and our state’s agricultural economy in the process.

I do hope you will take the opportunity to tour the building so that you can see firsthand why so much excitement has been growing around it in recent years. If you come, I promise an exciting interior built for function and form, with hues of blue, green, yellow, red, and other colors representing the diverse spectrum of North Carolina’s geography. You will see the very first demonstration in our demo lab, as well as our towering 24-foot rooftop greenhouses with some very high-tech features, including some of the most accurate climate control systems in the world. 

Thank you again for your support, and I look forward to the chance of seeing you at the dedication. Please take the time to learn more about it here

Dr. Adrian Percy,
Executive Director,
N.C. Plant Sciences Initiative