Many students at Colorado State University are unaware of just how much agriculture unites the institution. The school started out as a college dedicated to the subject and continues to maintain strong ties to this day, having one of the best agriculture programs in the country. Even students in seemingly unrelated majors hold importance within the discipline.

It can be difficult to articulate exactly what agriculture is, as it encompasses so much as a discipline. In fact, new College of Agricultural Sciences Dean Carolyn Lawrence-Dill herself had quite a long journey identifying with it.

“As an undergraduate, I really didn’t realize that what I was interested in was agricultural sciences,” Lawrence-Dill said. “In fact, early on, I was interested in veterinary medicine.”

Growing up in a small town in Texas, Lawrence-Dill said the closest thing she saw to a scientist back then was the local vet. This was what inspired her to pursue biology for her undergraduate degree at Hendrix College, with the hope of getting into veterinary school afterward.

“Agriculture is special in that it is not about the discipline; it’s about the purpose.” -Carolyn Lawrence-Dill, College of Agricultural Sciences dean

Wanting to gain additional research experience outside the classroom, Lawrence-Dill applied for a summer internship at Texas Tech University that happened to be focused on studying cotton plants. It was this experience that got the dean interested in plant sciences.

“It showed me that research was something I was interested in, and plants were something that — my whole life — I had been interested in, but I didn’t realize it was even a career path,” Lawrence-Dill said.

Participating in the internship again the following summer, Lawrence-Dill realized that her future was in plant physiology.

This internship prompted Lawrence-Dill to complete her master’s degree in biology from Texas Tech based on the data she collected on cotton over the previous summers. Looking at the metabolism of the plants, she researched how cool nightly temperatures affected their productivity, discovering the cold had a negative effect.

While completing her master’s, Lawrence-Dill discovered her passion for genetics, cell and molecular biology. Following this, she began her Ph.D. in botany at the University of Georgia. There she studied under Kelly Dawe, a CSU alumnus who earned his bachelor’s from the department of horticulture and landscape architecture. This time, her research centered on maize genetics, looking at how chromosomes move.

“Even at that point, everything I was working on probably related more to cancer research than it did to agriculture because the molecular mechanisms for how chromosomes move are fairly conserved,” Lawrence-Dill said in relation to her work with microbiology. During this time, she also focused on computing sequenced-based data, strategically using computers to design her experiments.

This paved the way for her future career in data management, in which she was employed as a bioinformatics analyst at Iowa State University. She later went on to become the lead scientist with the United States Department of Agriculture, running their Maize Genetics and Genomics Database for 10 years. Following this, she was hired as an associate professor at ISU.

“Working for the USDA, you start to get a real view into what agriculture is and the fact (is) that this really basic biology gets translated into things that become useful to people in production agriculture,” Lawrence-Dill said.

In the end, she discovered she was part of agricultural science all along. As for what exactly agricultural science is, the dean defined it like this: “It’s all about what you’re trying to accomplish for growers and for producers. … Agriculture is special in that it is not about the discipline; it’s about the purpose. And the purpose is to improve the planet and improve the human condition.”