The head of U.S. food and agriculture will visit WSU on July 9 to address societal changes he refers to as “wicked problems” – including population growth, poverty and climate change.

Sonny Ramaswamy, the director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), will deliver a lecture titled “Setting the Table for a Hotter, Flatter, More Crowded Earth.”

The talk will begin at 10 a.m. in room T101 of the Food Science and Human Nutrition building. A reception will take place at 9 a.m. in the ground-floor lobby of the building. Both are free and open to the public.

Ramaswamy oversees 350 employees and a budget of $1.3 billion. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a fellow of the Entomological Society of America and a distinguished alumnus of Rutgers University.

The talk is an installment of WSU’s Sam Smith Lecture Series, which is hosted by the plant pathology department of the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences (CAHNRS). Samuel H. Smith was the former WSU president for whom the Center for Undergraduate Education (CUE) is named.

The talk will be streamed live at experience.wsu.edu.