Dennis Keeney Distinguished Lecture Series
What is the Keeney Distinguished Lecture Series?
The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture honors its founding and former director, Dr. Dennis Keeney, by hosting the Keeney Distinguished Lecture Series. Lecturers in the series address the multiple tradeoffs generated by human social and economic systems interactions with our soil and water resources.
Whom does it honor?
Dennis Keeney came to Iowa from Wisconsin in 1988 to become the first director of the Leopold Center. He grew up on an Iowa dairy farm near Runnells, and was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin in soils and water chemistry.
As the first director of the Leopold Center from 1988 through 1999, Keeney pioneered research and outreach on agricultural issues related to sustainability, land resource use, rural community development and water quality. His vision of the Center as a catalyst for work that others might be reluctant to do yielded a host of innovations — multidisciplinary research teams that focused on key Iowa issues, support of basic science to improve soil testing and nutrient management, and a broad-based grants program that entertained queries from all quarters.
Keeney also brought the Leopold Center an international reputation in research on groundwater quality, nitrogen use and interdisciplinary studies. While at the Center, he also served in leadership roles for the American Society of Agronomy, Soil Science Society of America and the Iowa State Water Resources Research Institute. He retired in 1999 and is Senior Fellow for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis and the Department of Soil, Air and Water at the University of Minnesota, and a visiting scholar for the Center for a Livable Future, Johns Hopkins University.
Series speakers
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November 12, 2009
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October 27, 2007 |
Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture |
Ames, Iowa 50011 |
(515) 294-3711 |
leocenter@iastate.edu