The University of Minnesota has an exceptional array of researchers working on a variety of aspects related to soybean improvement for Minnesota growers. While university departments are an efficient way to organize curricula and conduct business, they also can tend to inhibit collaboration between researchers from different yet complimentary disciplines. The formation of an academic center is one way to help form bridges between departments, bring researchers together, attract new researchers, and enhance communication and outreach around a single problem. To this end, we soybean researchers at the University of Minnesota have spent the last year and founding and organizing the Soybean Research Center to bring together UMN researchers working on a broad array of aspects related to soybean improvement and utilization. During the past eighteen months, we have successfully created a center consisting of 25 members, hired a coordinator, held Center events, developed a website, and initiated a campaign to attract outside funds. We feel the Center has been highly successful in helping to bring together soybean researchers across campus, including students, and raising our profile on a national level. During the next year, we want to continue these activities, in addition to establishing a mode of better promoting research activities to the public, recruit new researchers to the Center, and solicit funds from private organizations.

Objective 1. Continue developing the University of Minnesota Soybean Center for all (present and future) UMN soybean researchers to join and participate in.

Goal 1. Elevate UMN soybean research through providing the opportunity for creation of synergy among all soybean researchers from different disciplines.
Goal 2. Enhance communication and coordination of UMN soybean research activities through a better and more sustained and coordinated presence on the web, social media, and press releases.
Goal 3. Attract new researchers to soybean from a broad array of departments that do not traditionally work on agricultural commodities such as soybean.

A functioning University of Minnesota Soybean Research Center that will enable better communication between soybean researchers and producers, ultimately enhancing the quality of soybean research conducted in Minnesota.

Update:
Just before the official start date of this project, we held a spring networking event so all soybean researchers on campus could connect with one another. After May, the main activity was the hiring of a center admin and communications specialist to help us organize events and promote communications. She is part time working for the center at 10 hours per week and has been a tremendous help. The main activity she helped with (and which Seth Naeve and Aaron Lorenz, Center Co-directors) were involved with this quarter was organization of a major Soybean Research Center Field Day. We had over 100 participants on August 31, and presentations from eight researcher groups, including their students and postdocs. Over 15 posters were presented. Overall, we feel like this event was a major success and will launch our campaign to bring in external stakeholders and raise additional funds. We received lots of positive feedback. See this new article published in Agweek.

https://www.agweek.com/crops/soybeans/umns-soybean-research-center-puts-work-on-display

Update:

View uploaded report

Updated June 20, 2024:
Dec 1 - Feb 28
During this quarter, the main activities were keeping up on social media posts to promote soybean research activities at UMN, continuing to update the website to capture all SRC-related news, planned and held a "lightning talks" and networking event on January 26, and hosted three monthly Center faculty lunches.

The website can be found here: https://soybeanresearchcenter.umn.edu/. On this website, we have posted news happening during this quarter as well as "Researcher Spotlights". The researcher spotlights are written by our part-time communications specialist with the goal of informing internal people and outside stakeholders about how is engaged in soybean research on campus and little personal information to foster community and give some background on how each person got into their field of study. We also post news items to keep outside stakeholders and center members abreast on what accomplishments and activities are going on among Center members. The main challenge with this has been getting Center members to tell us what they are doing.

On January 26 we hosted a SRC "Lightning Talk and Networking Event". This event was attended by ~30 Center faculty/students/staff and highlighted the research of seven individuals. The event helped foster community and communicate what research is going on to a broad audience with the hope of sparking collaborative efforts across disciplines.

Finally, we hosted three faculty lunches to allow Center faculty members to get together on regular basis and discuss opportunities for collaborative research. It is hard for faculty across departments to get together, and we believe hosting such events is necessary to help people get to know one another better and become more familiar with diverse research efforts on soybean.

Updated June 20, 2024:
Just before the official start date of this project, we held a spring networking event so all soybean researchers on campus could connect with one another. After May, the main activity was the hiring of a center admin and communications specialist to help us organize events and promote communications. She is part time working for the center at 10 hours per week and has been a tremendous help. The main activity she helped with (and which Seth Naeve and Aaron Lorenz, Center Co-directors) were involved with this quarter was organization of a major Soybean Research Center Field Day. We had over 100 participants on August 31, and presentations from eight researcher groups, including their students and postdocs. Over 15 posters were presented. Overall, we feel like this event was a major success and will launch our campaign to bring in external stakeholders and raise additional funds. We received lots of positive feedback. See this new article published in Agweek.

https://www.agweek.com/crops/soybeans/umns-soybean-research-center-puts-work-on-display

During Q2, we made progress on developing our website (soybeanresearchcenter.umn.edu), social media communications (https://twitter.com/SoybeanUMN), and networking events. We also hosted a soybean research seminar by Dr. Rachael Vann from North Carolina State University.

During Q3, the main activities were keeping up on social media posts to promote soybean research activities at UMN, continuing to update the website to capture all SRC-related news, planned and held a "lightning talks" and networking event on January 26, and hosted three monthly Center faculty lunches.

The website can be found here: https://soybeanresearchcenter.umn.edu/. On this website, we have posted news happening during this quarter as well as "Researcher Spotlights". The researcher spotlights are written by our part-time communications specialist with the goal of informing internal people and outside stakeholders about how is engaged in soybean research on campus and little personal information to foster community and give some background on how each person got into their field of study. We also post news items to keep outside stakeholders and center members abreast on what accomplishments and activities are going on among Center members. The main challenge with this has been getting Center members to tell us what they are doing.

On January 26 we hosted a SRC "Lightning Talk and Networking Event". This event was attended by ~30 Center faculty/students/staff and highlighted the research of seven individuals. The event helped foster community and communicate what research is going on to a broad audience with the hope of sparking collaborative efforts across disciplines.

Finally, we hosted three faculty lunches to allow Center faculty members to get together on regular basis and discuss opportunities for collaborative research. It is hard for faculty across departments to get together, and we believe hosting such events is necessary to help people get to know one another better and become more familiar with diverse research efforts on soybean.

During Q4, we continued to communicate events and news items, initiated planning of a summer outstate soybean field tour targeted to students and postdocs. We are planning on visiting on farm and two industry sites. This is still in the planning stage. We also created and published our first newsletter (https://mailchi.mp/b644c72b07c6/soybean-research-center-spring-2024-newsletter?e=8b890c2d06). This will be the first of regular newsletters we plan on sending out to our listserv to keep stakeholders abreast of our accomplishments and activities.

During this past year the University of Minnesota Soybean Research Center engaged in several activities to help promote and enhance soybean-related research on campus. We held a major field day last summer attended by more than 100 people, hosted seminar speakers, hosted regular faculty networking lunches, held a SRC-wide "Lightning Talk and Networking Event", participated in the national "Coordinated Soybean Centers Group Meeting" in Indianapolis, kept the website up-to-date with news and accomplishments, maintained a social media presence, created content in the form of "researcher spotlights", and published our first newsletter sent out to all Center members and stakeholders. All of these activities contribute to better a better on-campus soybean research community and promotion of our work to a wider audience.

The establishment of the University of Minnesota Soybean Center would create synergy among soybean researchers, attract leveraged funding, and facilitate better communication and coordination of all UMN soybean research. This will ultimately lead to more collaborative projects tackling larger and more complex problems of relevance to Minnesota soybean growers.