Kevin Kregel

Kevin Kregel has been named interim provost by University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld last week with the reassignment of Montse Fuentes, provost since spring of 2019, as special assistant to the UI president.

Mr. Kregel has been executive vice president and senior associate provost for faculty since 2019. He received a bachelor's degree and doctorate (physiology and biophysics) from the UI and joined the faculty at Iowa in 1993 after completing a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Arizona. He served as department executive officer in the Department of Health and Human Physiology before he was appointed associate provost in 2014.

The UI announced Ms. Fuentes will lead a team updating the university's strategic plan and dedicate part of her time to her research, while retaining her current salary of $439,000.

Mr. Harreld praised both leaders in a news release, saying Ms. Fuentes' work will help the UI's colleges identify trends that will provide a "roadmap for the future success of our students and faculty." He said Mr. Kregel and his experience in multiple university positions over the past two decades will make a steady hand during one of the most turbulent times in the university's history.

The appointment of Mr. Kregel is pending approval by the Iowa Board of Regents, and will also carry a $439,000 salary.

 

	Anne Harris

Grinnell College has named Anne Harris as the college's 14th president, the Des Moines Business Record reports.

 

Ms. Harris, who joined Grinnell College last year as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college, has been the acting president since July 1 and will assume office immediately.

 

Ms. Harris, Grinnell's second female president, spent nearly 20 years at DePauw University in Indiana as a faculty member and eventually vice president for academic affairs before coming to Grinnell in 2019. The private liberal arts college in Grinnell enrolls about 1,700 students from around the world.

 

Her unanimous appointment by the board of trustees follows the tenure of Raynard Kington, who led the college for a decade before becoming head of school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, earlier this summer.

 

"Anne Harris is a scholar, a teacher, a leader and a builder - without question, she is precisely the right president for Grinnell College at this time in our history," said David Maxwell, chair of the Grinnell College board of trustees. "She is consistently guided by Grinnell's institutional values of excellence, diversity and social responsibility, dealing gracefully and decisively with hard issues as the college navigates the challenges before it, and recognizes Grinnell as a place where we can experience and investigate, where we can deliberate and discern, and where we can put our values, knowledge and commitment together for the greater good."

 

As vice president for academic affairs, Ms. Harris worked in partnership with more than 200 faculty members to deliver on Grinnell's academic mission, the college said in a press release. In this role, she led a number of initiatives tied to the excellence, health and well-being of the Grinnell community, including directing the academic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting the development and implementation of a First Year Experience, chairing the search for a chief diversity officer, and overseeing the implementation of a $1 million Mellon Foundation Humanities in Action grant.

 

Her appointment comes after an extensive national search that resulted in more than 30 interviews of candidates from peer institutions, Grinnell officials said.  

A new federal grant will allow a research team led by Iowa State University, Penn State and Roeslein Alternative Energy to develop new methods of turning biomass and manure into fuel, ISU's news service reports.

 

The five-year, $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute for Food and Agriculture will power the Consortium for Cultivating Human and Natural reGenerative Enterprise (C-CHANGE) as it works to develop new ways for farmers to produce renewable natural gas that could be used as an energy source both on and off farms.

 

The project, led by Lisa Schulte Moore, a professor of natural resource ecology and management and associate director of the Bioeconomy Institute at ISU, centers around anaerobic digestion, or the process by which microorganisms break down biomatter and produce biogas. With new separation technologies, biogas can be upgraded to renewable natural gas and distributed through the gas pipeline network.

 

Researchers are experimenting with how to optimize digesters, or the containers where the biomatter is broken down into methane. They will test variables such as feedstock mixture, pretreatment, digester temperature and water content to make the process as practical as possible.

 

Anaerobic digestion has been promoted as a way to produce renewable energy for more than 50 years, according to Tom Richard, director of Penn State's Institutes of Energy and the Environment, but its adoption has been limited by high capital costs and management complexity.

 

"We will be working with farmers and other industrial partners to update anaerobic digestion for the 21st century, applying the principles of process intensification, automation and economies of scale to reduce costs, simplify operations and expand digester feedstocks beyond manure to incorporate perennial grasses and winter crops into their operations as a source of biomass for the digesters," Mr. Richard said in a release.

 

St. Louis-based Roeslein Alternative Energy is already doing pioneering work in the area of the grant, according to ISU officials. The company has worked with hog producer Smithfield Foods since 2012, adjusting its manure practices to create a profitable natural gas enterprise. Company founder Rudi Roeslein said energy production from biogas could spark significant job creation in the alternative energy and agriculture sectors while also providing new habitat for threatened wildlife, including pollinators.

 

"With this grant, we hope to demonstrate that land unprofitable for annual crops could be used for renewable energy production from native grasses and forbs through the anaerobic digestion process," Mr. Roeslein said. "Ecological services from this perennial biomass crop would prevent flooding, reduce nutrients running into our streams and rivers that could save hundreds of billions of taxpayer money on water treatment facilities while improving the health of our future generations."

 

The consortium will engage producers, commodity groups and companies to see how receptive farmers and businesses are to implementing management practices and other knowledge emerging from experiments.

 

In addition to ISU, Penn State and Roeslein Alternative Energy, other institutions involved with the new C-CHANGE grant include FDCE of New Albany, Ohio; the USDA Agricultural Research Service National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment in Ames, and 33 partner organizations.