Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Advisory Board: Coletti joins Leopold Center Advisory Board as ISU representative

Back to Leopold Letter Summer 2010

Joe Colletti, the newest member of the Leopold Center advisory board, is no stranger to the Center or its work. He has benefited from Leopold Center work in the past when he served on one of the Leopold Center’s first multidisciplinary research groups, the Agroecology Issue Team formed in 1991, when he was a faculty member in the forestry department, now natural resource ecology and management.

When asked why he’s interested in helping the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, he said that he thinks it is a facilitator of change in technologies, management practices, and public policy in the field of agriculture.

As the senior associate dean for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Iowa State University, Colletti is responsible for the budgets of the college. His decisions affect the training of the future leaders and practitioners in agriculture, what research is being done; and what faculty is doing with that training and research. It should be no surprise that he wants to see the best of each come out of Iowa State and give them the best opportunity to succeed.

One of the things he wants to focus on while working on the advisory board is to see where the gaps are in research being conducted now that can be filled with new research that ranges from local to global and having the potential of high impact.

“I highly value the work done here and think that good science facilitated by the Leopold Center can help farmers of all scales,” said Colletti. “The research done through the Leopold Center helps us to understand the benefits and costs of all farming practices and can affect national policy.”

Back to Leopold Letter Summer 2010