Peter W.B. Phillips, new NSERC-SSHRC Chair in Managing Knowledge-Based Agri-Food Development, addresses an audience. Phillips previously held the Van Vliet Chair in Agricultural Economics.

Bio/Historical Note: Hadley Van Vliet was born in 1914 at Quinton, Saskatchewan and graduated from the University of Saskatchewan in 1934 with Great Distinction. He received his MSc in 1936 specializing in farm management. Van Vliet studied for his PhD at the University of Wisconsin. It was the Wisconsin tradition of studies in economics, law and rural sociology that give him his orientation for his teaching, research and community work in Saskatchewan. He returned to Saskatchewan where he was appointed instructor in the School of Agriculture in 1938. He became assistant professor in 1940 and full professor and department head in 1944. Three of his students became Rhodes scholars and many of them took awards of similar stature in Canada and abroad. Five were awarded the Governor General's medal as the most distinguished university graduates of the year. Van Vliet died suddenly 8 December 1968 at Quinton at age 54. Two days before his death, he gave the principal paper at a meeting of the Saskatchewan branch of the Canadian Agricultural Economics Society.