Linda McCandless ’74 was recently named Director of Communications for the College of Agriculture of Life Sciences. Now settled into her new position, the former director of communications for CALS’ Geneva campus is heading several exciting initiatives for the college.
‘Strategic Approach’
“We need to have a more strategic approach to communications at the College,” McCandless said. “This college is one of the flagships for the University and we need to get our stories out there and work with other initiatives going on at Cornell and within Life Sciences to communicate better amongst ourselves and with other stakeholders.”
Currently, McCandless and her team are working on a new website for CALS that will be more user-friendly and easier to navigate. It is set to launch in April.
Qualifications
“[McCandless] really understands the college and the political issues in New York state,” said Susan A. Henry, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “She is very well acquainted with the faculty and many agriculture stakeholders. She’s a superb writer and she was able to immediately go to work on issues confronting the college.”
In May, CALS will celebrate its 100th anniversary. In commemoration, McCandless and her colleagues are in the process of planning the College’s Centential Year Celebration, taking place May 12. The festivities will include a kick-off parade complete with floats, marching bands, horses and an ice cream social.
“It’ll be a great break in study week,” McCandless said.
Prior to accepting this position, McCandless was the director of communications for CALS’ experiment station in Geneva, N.Y. The station became part of CALS in 1923 and is a base for research in entomology, plant pathology, horticulture science and food science and technology.
“As we like to say, we do research all the way from the molecular level to the markets,” McCandless said.
With the recent resignation of CALS’ director of public relations, the college’s administration decided to bring the communications efforts for the Ithaca and Geneva campuses under one director.
“It really isn’t so much a creation of a new position as a restructuring of positions already present in the college,” said Henry.
The position is part of CALS’ administrative effort to restructure communication practices.
“It’s really important to us to have a person help us develop a strategy for how we convey what we are to the outside world,” Henry said.
Archived article by Stacey Delikat