A $500,000 endowed professorship from Love, Tito’s, the philanthropic heart of Tito’s Handmade Vodka, will support responsive agriculture teaching, research, service and professional development in the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
Responsive agriculture, a focus area of the Texas A&M AgriLife Institute for Advancing Health Through Agriculture, IHA, is a science-based, dynamic systems approach to agriculture that seeks to respond to the growing public health challenge of escalating chronic disease while considering environmental sustainability and economic viability.
The “Love, Tito’s Endowed Professorship in Responsive Agriculture” will advance the responsive agriculture research mission to understand relationships among animal and plant agricultural production and management, the environment, nutrient quality, nutrient content and human health:
— Human Nutrition and Public Health: Identify how production agriculture can support human health by increasing the health promoting qualities of food and agricultural products.
— Environment: Systems approaches to identify how agriculture can support environmental quality and make agriculture more resilient to changes in the environment by efforts to increase and sustain carbon sequestration, reduce greenhouse gas production, increase water-use efficiency and diminish negative impacts on water quality, and enhance the options for creation of renewable energy.
— Economic Health: By linking improved understanding of consumers and society, this research emphasis identifies how consumer behavior science and behavior economics impacts the food systems, and how to fast track adoption of new systems by producers, processors, or consumers by identifying what consumers want and what is their acceptance.
A boost for responsive agriculture
“This investment supports increasingly vital research that improves the lives of Texans,” said Jeffrey W. Savell, Ph.D., vice chancellor and dean for Agriculture and Life Sciences. “The exceptional individual who fills this professorship will be a transformational force for Texas agriculture and health.”
“Love, Tito’s donates funding to a variety of promising research projects, and an area that we’re particularly interested in is innovation in the future of food, nutrition and agriculture,” said Sarah Everett, Ph.D., director of global impact and research at Tito’s Handmade Vodka. “Texas A&M AgriLife Institute for Advancing Health Through Agriculture is doing groundbreaking work in the area of responsive agriculture, and we’re pleased to provide support for continued research via our endowed professorship.”
The “Love, Tito’s Endowed Professorship in Responsive Agriculture” recipient will be selected by Texas A&M AgriLife by Summer 2023.
-30-
