SAN ANGELO – Steve Byrns of San Angelo has received a Texas A&M AgriLife Vice Chancellor’s Award in the AgriLife Services Staff category.
The honor was presented Jan. 9 during the 2014 Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service Centennial Conference in College Station.
Byrns has been a media relations specialist with Texas A&M AgriLife Communications for 31 years, serving the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension centers at San Angelo and Lubbock, as well as almost 70 AgriLife Extension county offices in the South Plains, West Central and Far West regions of Texas. He also handles media relations for the wildlife and fisheries sciences, and entomology departments at Texas A&M University in College Station.
As a news writer for the Texas A&M AgriLife agencies, Byrns annually writes more than 120 news articles, which run in media outlets locally, nationally and occasionally internationally. His news articles have reached more than 1 billion worldwide through thousands of news outlets, according to the citation.
Byrns also is credited with “innovative solutions to communications problems” such as naming an educational effort to clear Texas pastures of useless plants “Brush Busters” in order to be more user friendly for landowners who needed the information.
He also was designated the coordinator of public information for the Texas Department of Emergency Management’s Drought Task Force in 2009, leading its Joint Information Center to help all affected state agencies generate common data for use by the public and news media.
Byrns obtained a bachelor’s in journalism in 1978 and a master’s in animal science in 1982, both from Angelo State University.
The Vice Chancellor’s Awards in Excellence were established in 1980 to recognize the commitment and outstanding contributions of Texas A&M AgriLife faculty and staff statewide.
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