Yuan (Daniel) Cheng is an outstanding scholar in the field of public and nonprofit management and has an international reputation for his interdisciplinary research in the areas of government-nonprofit relations, coproduction, and cross-sector collaboration. He is the managing editor of Public Administration Review and board member of the Minneapolis Parks Foundation. In close collaboration with governmental and community organizations, Dr.

Luciano Caixeta is an animal health researcher who focuses on improving the health of dairy cows with the ultimate goal to help feed the ever-growing world population. His research focuses on the period around parturition of dairy cows. During this period, cows have a considerable risk of metabolic disorders and infectious diseases. Dr. Caixeta combines basic and applied research to describe the physiological adaptations of dairy cows under metabolic stress. With his research, Dr.

George Annor’s research focuses on components of cereals and grains and how they are affected by breeding, agronomical practices, and nonthermal processing techniques. With faculty in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, he is working to explore the food and functional characteristics of new and novel cereal, protein, and oilseed crops. As an example, he developed a method to rapidly screen large numbers of samples for wheat gluten quality at early stages of wheat variety development.

Ann Waltner has been a transformative mentor of graduate students for over thirty years. Her work has sustained intellectual bridges to China, and established the University’s presence in Asian history and Asian studies. Moreover she is also an innovator in interdisciplinary graduate training, has dramatically improved graduate funding in her department, and helped recruit and retain diverse graduate cohorts.