As summer turns to fall, the Virginia Tech campus is buzzing with activity again, as students return following the summer break.
As we enter our fifth year, the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences continues to grow. We are expanding our programs to prepare graduates for an ever-changing workforce.
This year, we are adding two new majors, Ecological Restoration and Integrated Agriculture Technologies.
Ecological restoration will be vitally important over the next several decades.
In the U.S., there is a big need to bring new life to lands that have been damaged or degraded in the past.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed by Congress, provides more than $19 billion for land management, risk mitigation, and other restoration projects.
The White House anticipates this investment alone will create millions of jobs. With this new major, the School is poised to educate students, so they are well trained and positioned for these exciting and important careers.
We are also preparing our students for the technological revolution with our Integrated Agriculture Technologies (IAT) major.
As the population continues to grow worldwide and with a shortage of workers, industries are turning to technology more than ever before.
Our new IAT major will prepare students to utilize new tools, like drones, satellite imaging, optics, sensors, robotics, and more, to help boost production to meet an increasing need.
To help students learn, we are making large investments in our classrooms and teaching labs.
We are especially updating our teaching facilities, to provide our students with a higher level of hands-on experiences and increasing our use of experiential learning.
All total, over the past two years, we have renovated or created nine teaching spaces in the School. These include a new plant identification lab, a new landscape design teaching studio, new floral design studio, a greenhouse experiential learning lab, and an upgraded soils teaching lab.
To support our new IAT major, we have just finished work on two Tech Learning Sandboxes and a Data Analytics Teaching Lab. We’ll tell you more about that program and go more in-depth on those spaces in the Winter edition of the magazine.
This is our first edition of The Magazine of SPES. This is something we have wanted to do since the school was formed in 2018, but was delayed as a result of challenges due to COVID-19.
With that mostly behind us, and life starting to return to a new normal, I am excited to use our quarterly magazine to keep our stakeholders, alumni, faculty, staff, and students up-to-date on the happenings of the school, showcasing the great teaching, Extension and research occurring.
Michael Evans
Director and Professor