Swine Health Information Center names New Associate Director

As part of its effort to  become more impactful and better able to meet the needs of pork producers, the Swine Health Information Center has named a new Associate Director. Launched by the National Pork Board in 2015 with Pork Checkoff funding, the Swine Health Information Center focuses on prevention, preparedness, and response to novel and emerging swine disease for the benefit of U.S. swine health.

Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says, by expanding staff, SHIC will be better positioned to multiply return-on-investment results and protect the health of the U.S. swine herd through comprehensive preparedness, monitoring, response, and communications activities.

Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:

Dr. Megan Niederwerder, formerly of Kansas State University and the veterinary school in Kansas State has agreed to become our new Associate Director for SHIC. That's the what and that's the who and we're really happy to have Megan on board.

The why is the important piece and the why is to make sure that we're doing everything that we can do to address the needs of the U.S. pork industry. The National pork Board extended the funding for another at least six years for SHIC and so there's still a lot to be done. The discussion with the SHIC Board of Directors was, do we do things deeper or do we do things wider with this extra funding.

We can do fewer things and do them in more detail or we can do more things and give as much detail as needed but make more things happen. In order to do that we needed to have some help and I'm really glad that Dr. Niederwerder is going to join us. It's a matter of helping SHIC have more impact and meet the needs of the U.S. pork producers.