APLU’s President McPherson and Vice President Demment Honored with Awards for International Leadership

APLU President McPherson Honored with NAFSA Pyle Award for Leadership and Collaboration in International Education Exchange
APLU President Peter McPherson was recently honored with the 2016 Cassandra Pyle Award from NAFSA: Association of International Educators last month. The award recognizes President McPherson’s lifelong commitment to international higher education, and the legacy he has built over a career that has spanned more than five decades with leadership positions in government, academia, and the private sector.

As Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development during the 1980s, McPherson increased the number of students receiving long-term training – mostly graduate education – from 17,000 to 18,000 a year and strongly supported strengthening universities in developing countries.

That higher education work continued during his tenure as president of Michigan State University. He led efforts to form a coalition of 24 university presidents committed to tackling international challenges and advocacy for resources to support higher education and agriculture in the USAID budget. Also while at Michigan State, he chaired the congressionally-appointed Abraham Lincoln Study Abroad Commission and championed the expansion of study abroad among American students.

McPherson played an integral role in the creation of the APLU Knowledge Center, which undertakes analysis of higher education’s contribution to development. He has also expanded the APLU International Programs office and reoriented its work to focus more on identifying ways for North American public research universities to help strengthen higher education institutions in developing countries.

APLU’s Demment Honored with 2016 AIARD Award for Distinguished Service
Montague (Tag) Demment, APLU’s Vice President for International Programs, was honored last month with the Association for International Agriculture and Rural Development’s 2016 Distinguished Service Award. The award recognizes a proven commitment to public service that has advanced AIARD’s mission, innovative contributions to AIARD programs, and longstanding service in the international arena and in AIARD.

Demment has demonstrated a lifelong commitment to agricultural and rural development. After earning his undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate degrees from Harvard College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he served as an NIH postdoctoral Fellow in animal nutrition at Cornell University. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia where he contributed to the establishment of the Simien National Park in the Amhara Region of the country.

Demment has been a proponent of research, outreach, and education for developing countries, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, for his entire adult life. In his position at APLU, he leads APLU’s international programs and advocates for higher education support to developing countries. He contributed to the creation of APLU’s Africa-U.S. Higher Education Initiative and organized the process by which the research community provided input to United States Agency for International Development’s Feed the Future research strategy. He has also helped develop programs such as BHEARD and the HED university partnerships and served as president of AIARD in 1998.

Demment is former Director of the Global Livestock Collaborative Research Support Program and Professor Emeritus of ecology at the University of California, Davis. As Director of the Global Livestock Collaborative Research Support Program, his vision created a dynamic and successful program that has profound impact on the developing world. Of particular importance was the work done on the demonstrated that meat consumption (micronutrients) had a significant positive impact on the cognitive and physical development of children in developing countries. He was also instrumental in the development of the Norman E. Borlaug Leadership Enhancement in Agriculture Program (LEAP), which has inspired a generation of future African leaders.

At the University of California, Davis, he left a legacy of programs. He developed the first degree program in Sustainable Agriculture at UCD and was the founding director of the College of Agriculture and Environment Sciences sustainable agricultural program. During his tenure, he created the 100-year experiment to study the sustainability of production systems known as the LTRAS–Long-term Research on Agricultural Sustainability. Also at UC Davis, Demment convened and led the Globalization Commission. The Commission resulted in the creation of the Vice Provost for International Programs and a campus-wide international strategy.