Voiland Named Director of WRRI

August 17, 2009

Contact:
Kelly Porter, 919/513-1152, kelly_porter@ncsu.edu

Michael P. Voiland, executive director of North Carolina Sea Grant, has been named director of the Water Resources Research Institute (WRRI) of The University of North Carolina. Voiland has been serving as acting director of WRRI since April.

As director, Voiland oversees WRRI’s statewide research and information transfer programs and will serve as a member of the North Carolina Sedimentation Control Commission, as provided by statute.

Voiland will now lead both WRRI and also the North Carolina Sea Grant College Program. Both programs are administered from offices located in the same building on the North Carolina State University campus in Raleigh.

"Given the similarities in the two programs’ focus on water resources and their missions in research and outreach, the university felt that joint leadership made the most organizational and budgetary sense,” said Voiland. “I am pleased and honored to take on the new duties, and will strive to have both programs remain as outstanding inter-institutional efforts within the UNC system.”

Voiland received a bachelor's and master's degrees in geography from the State University of New York at Albany. He earned a doctorate in natural resource management from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse University.

Voiland’s career began in New York, working within New York Sea Grant and Cornell Cooperative Extension. In 1976, he was hired as a regional extension specialist, and in 1985 was named Great Lakes program coordinator. From 1987 to 1994, he was associate director and extension leader for New York Sea Grant. During that time, he twice served as interim director of the program.

In 1994, Voiland began his six-year tenure in Cornell University’s office of government affairs, first as a senior legislative associate, then two years as assistant director. In 2000, he moved to a joint position as assistant director for research and extension at Cornell’s Agricultural Experiment Station and Cornell Cooperative Extension. In the latter role, he was charged with ensuring that research and outreach programs were effectively integrated.

Voiland joined North Carolina Sea Grant in June 2006. As North Carolina Sea Grant executive director, he oversees the program’s research and outreach efforts on coastal topics including ecosystems, fisheries and seafood, coastal communities and hazard mitigation. He also holds appointments as research associate professor at UNC Wilmington, and adjunct associate professor at NCSU.

Located at North Carolina State University, WRRI is one of 54 state water institutes that were authorized by the Water Resources Research Act of 1964 to administer and promote federal/state partnerships in research and information transfer on water-related issues. The mission of WRRI is threefold:

• to identify the state's ever-changing research needs,
• to motivate and support research by qualified scientists, and
• to provide for technology transfer.