Agriculture & Horticulture

Biography

Dr. Shane C. Burgess first in his family to complete college, he graduated with distinction as a veterinarian in 1989 from Massey University, New Zealand. He has worked in and managed veterinary clinical practices in Australia and the UK, including horses, farm animals, pets, wild and zoo animals, and emergency medicine and surgery. He did a radiology residency at Murdoch University in Perth in Western Australia, where he concurrently co-founded Perth’s first emergency veterinary clinic. He has managed aquaculture facilities in Scotland. Between 1995 and 1998, while working full time outside of the academy, he did his Ph.D. in virology, immunology and cancer biology (Bristol University Medical School, UK). Dr. Burgess worked in the UK World Reference Laboratory for Exotic Diseases during the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease crisis, where he led the diagnosis reporting office. He was awarded a Director’s Award for Service. In 2002, Dr. Burgess joined Mississippi State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine as an assistant professor. He was recruited from Mississippi State as a professor, associate dean of the college and director of the Institute for Genomics, Biocomputing and Biotechnology to lead the University of Arizona College of Agriculture and Life Sciences in July 2011. Dr. Burgess is currently Vice President for Agriculture, Life and Veterinary Sciences, and Cooperative Extension, Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Interim Dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine, and Director, Arizona Experiment Station at the University of Arizona. The college has a total budget of more than $120M with over 3,400 students and more than 1,800 employees. Dr. Burgess has been a Board Member of the Mississippi Biotechnology Association, served as a Mississippi Universities’ Industrial Outreach Committee member, and was President of the Mississippi Academy of Sciences, 2009-2010. He has served USDA NRSP8: National Animal Genome Research Program as a Bioinformatics Committee Member, was one of the two US (and the non-federal) Inaugural Co-chairs for the Working Group on Animal Biotechnology within the US-EC Task Force on Biotechnology, a National Executive Committee member for the Food Systems Leadership Institute, a University and Industry Consortium (UIC) Executive Committee Member and was on the UIC Project Steering Team for its assessment project to define graduate numbers/quality/skills supply vs. demand in agricultural and biotech industries (a collaboration with the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities). He currently serves on the Agri-Business and Water Council of Arizona Executive Committee, the Board of Directors for Arizona Farm Bureau, the Governor’s Agricultural Best Management Practices Committee for the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, the BIO5 Institute Deans’ Advisory Board, Tech Launch Arizona’s Internal Advisory Board, Arizona STEM Diploma Project Advisory committee, Flinn Foundation’s Arizona Bioscience Roadmap Steering Committee, the Arizona National Livestock Show Board of Directors, and Reid Park Zoological Society Board of Directors. Dr. Burgess also serves on a number of university-level planning and strategy committees.

Research Interest

veterinary science, cancer, virology, proteomics, immunology and bioinformatics research