Midwest Chapter
Pacific Northwest Chapter
Washington DC Area Chapter

Midwest Chapter
Aaron Park, PhD, PAS, Dpl. ACAS

The Midwest chapter continues to struggle to find enough critical mass to achieve a restart in the post COVID shut down era.  An individual has gone through our list of activities throughout the year and attempted to re-structure our board members to assign say ruminant directors to dairy conferences such as: Tri-State, 4-State, and Minnesota Nutrition Conference.  This approach was put forth as a way to pull some of the yolk off the President that feels the weight of knowing everything and doing everything.  Directors would serve as key contacts for conference officials, finding volunteers, obtaining funding if needed, publication, etc. The big need right now is locating willing volunteers to serve on the board. Once these folks are found, it is thought we would have off going board members responsible for finding at least two replacements for the board to vote on.

Pacific Northwest Chapter

Jim Sullivan, PhD, PAS

Current Officers

Jim Sullivan, President

Evin Sharman, President-Elect

Chad Mueller, Past President

John B. Hall, Director 1

Michelle Whiteside, Director 2

Benton Glaze, Director 3

Bill Sanchez, Secretary-Treasurer

Pedram Rezamand, PNWANC Liaison

1. Financial Update

2. Newsletter- Newsletter is released each month with information and updates to the membership

Committee Reports

1. Continuing Education
   • CEU opportunities are shared with the membership with highlights of upcoming meetings
   • Suggested we survey the membership on topics
   • Creating CEU opportunities ourselves-Looking to get local academia and industry presenters for CEU opportunities. Topics focused on regional issues.

2. Scholarship & Fundraising
   • Scholarships continue to be a major focus of our chapter. 
   • Need to raise money.
   • Reaching out to recruit our scholarship winners to be ambassadors to the PNW and help with recruiting on their campuses.  Also ask winners determine the impact the scholarships are having on their lives and careers.  Maybe create a video clip of students.
   • Fundraising ideas – was discussed that a small virtual auction would be a good place to start.  

• 15 -20 items, donated by companies or individuals.  Company names could be listed-little advertising. 
• Timeframe would be Fall
• Advertise in the newsletter and with email invites.
• Could also reach out to other ARPAS members in other areas or even other industry groups.  Especially if they knew proceeds would go for animal science scholarships in the PNW

3. Recruiting & Membership
   • Survey membership on needs and wants from the PNW Chapter
   • Highlight what I’m getting with my membership. – highlight all of this in the Newsletter. 

Washington DC Area Chapter
Bill Price, PhD, PAS, Dpl. ACAS

The ARPAS-DC Area Chapter consists of those members and non-members in the DMV (Washington/Maryland/Virginia) area.  There are many government employees, retirees and some industry members. 

We held monthly Zoom seminars this year.  Obviously, the pandemic has affected our efforts, so that is why we moved to a Zoom format.  We intend to move back to in-person noon-luncheon seminars starting in September of 2022.  We are putting our YouTube noon seminars on the national website.

Our annual chapter half-day Mini-Symposium, entitled Recent Food Safety and Animal Health Research at USDA ARS (Beltsville) and University of Maryland was held by Zoom on April 27, 2022.  

• Debabrata (Debu) Biswas, professor, Dept. of Animal and Avian Science, U of Maryland, College Park led off the symposium with a report on “Non-pathogenic and Auto-lytic Salmonella Vaccine in Reducing Salmonella in Poultry Gut”.
• Arpita Aditya, graduate student, Dept. of Animal and Avian Science, U of Maryland, College Park, reported on “Antagonistic mechanism of metabolites from Lactobacillus casei against Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli”.  
• J Eduardo Rico, assistant professor, Dept. of Animal and Avian Science, U of Maryland, College Park made a presentation on “Reevaluating the role of ketones in dairy cow nutrition and health: A research perspective”.
• Benjamin D Rosen (Ben), research biologist, Animal Genomics and Improvement Laboratory, ARS, USDA, BARC presented research findings on “Developing genomic resources for cattle, sheep, and goats.”.
• Bradd Joseph Haley (PhD), research microbiologist, Environmental Microbial & Food Safety Laboratory, ARS, USDA, BARC, talked on Microbial and Food Safety research.

The ARPAS-DC Area Chapter awarded two D. Vernon G. Pursel Memorial Distinguished Service Awards this year. The recipients were Michaela G. Alewynse, Ph.D. and Suzanne J. Sechen, Ph.D., PAS. 

The ARPAS-DC Area Chapter supported a grant to a University of Maryland animal science graduate student to attend ADSA or ASAS annual meeting as well as an internship for an undergraduate student to pursue a project in animal science. 

Bill Price was elected president.  Robin Keyser and Jerry Poley continued as secretary and treasurer, respectively.