Sylvan H. Wittwer was born on January 17, 1917 in Hurricane, Utah. He received a bachelor’s degree from Utah State Agricultural College and a Ph.D. in agriculture from the University of Missouri. Wittwer came to MSU in 1946 as an assistant professor of horticulture. He was the Director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at MSU from 1964 to 1983 and served as chairperson of the Board of Agriculture of the National Research Council from 1973 to 1977. An expert on the topic of global food production, he wrote Feeding a Billion in 1987 and Food, Climate, and Carbon Dioxide: The Global Environment and World Food Production in 1995. As director of the Experiment Station, Wittwer: worked to increase funding for the Station; established a remote sensing program and the Pesticide Research Center; established a firm base for toxicology research; coordinated an agriculture, genetics and plant breeding program; and designed research and educational programs in response to the PBB (accidental dairy cattle poisoning) crisis in the 1970s. He left the university in June 1983 and passed away on January 20, 2012.
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