Professor named to national science committee

An Auburn University professor has been named to a National Academy of Sciences committee examining how agricultural biotechnology can be used to address key global problems such as food security, health, pollution and natural resource conservation.

Greg Traxler, a professor in AU's Department of Agricultural Economics & Rural Sociology, will join the nine-member Global Challenges and Directions for Agricultural Biotechnology Committee.

The panel will meet in Washington, D.C., this month to finalize plans for a workshop this summer.

Traxler, who is also a researcher in the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, has made presentations to the NAS on issues of research policy on three previous occasions.

He was appointed to the agricultural biotechnology committee based largely on his expertise in the economics of innovation, intellectual property and research policy.

Also this month, Traxler will present remarks regarding biotechnology's impacts on agricultural productivity at a ministerial conference in San José, Costa Rica, and a World Bank workshop in Washington.

The ministerial conference, co-hosted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, will bring 20 ministers of agriculture and of science and technology together with agricultural scientists to focus on the use of scientific and technological advances to increase agricultural productivity.

At the World Bank workshop, Traxler and other economists and policy experts from around the world will make presentations that will be used to draft an in-depth report on the relationship between rural development and national development in Latin America and the Caribbean and that eventually will be used to help direct World Bank lending policy in the region.