WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue Univ.’s College of Agriculture presented the Distinguished Agriculture Alumni Award, its highest honor, to eight recipients during a campus ceremony earlier this month. This award honors mid-career Purdue Agriculture graduates who have made significant contributions to their profession or society in general and have a record of outstanding accomplishments.

The 2011 recipients include Angela Siemens, Wichita, Kan., vice president/technical services of Cargill Animal Protein. She is responsible for the management of food safety for the beef, pork, turkey and meat processing company. She began her career in agriculture in 1990 as a food technologist with Beatrice Foods Inc. before moving to Oscar Mayer Foods Corp. as a process technologist in 1992. She has served as vice president of quality assurance for Smithfield Foods and was responsible for management of all food-safety programs in the pork and meat processing company. Siemens received a bachelor's degree in animal sciences from Purdue in 1983.


Other recipients include Michael Beach, associate director for healthy water at the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta; Gary Chenoweth, vice president, customer relationship leader of Bunge Oils; W. Douglas Griffin, vice president of marketing of AGCO Corporation since 2006; Vernon Hawkins, president of Syngenta Crop Protection; Paavo Mäkinen, a deputy head at the European Commission Representation in Finland; John Mumford, director of the Center for Environmental Policy in the faculty of natural sciences at Imperial College London; and Fujiang Wen, Tai'an, Shandong Province, China, president of Shandong Agricultural Univ.