Christmas message from AFBI's CEO

2016 has been a year of significant change, internationally, nationally and indeed also for AFBI.

Within AFBI we celebrated our tenth anniversary on 1 April, 2016 – a significant milestone for the organisation. We also experienced major changes in staffing throughout the organisation. I particularly wish to acknowledge the contribution of Seamus Kennedy, who retired as Chief Executive in May 2016, and Lesley Hogg who moved on to pastures new in June, 2016 from her position as Director of Finance and Corporate Affairs Division. However, we have also recruited a number of new staff to the organisation across all the divisions and I am confident that they will make a major contribution to AFBI science and improved organisational efficiency in the years ahead.

We have achieved a number of notable successes during the year including securing significant funding (approx £7m) from a range of national and international competitive research calls. A further highlight in November was the signing of the Individual Funding Agreement for the Centre for Innovation Excellence in Livestock (approx £3.6m).

As an organisation, our primary role is to deliver world-class science to support innovation and improve efficiency throughout the local agri-food and fisheries sector. In my first two months as Chief Executive it has been my privilege to see many examples of excellent science being applied to statutory and diagnostic work, research and policy development across AFBI. A key priority for AFBI in 2017 will be to prioritise those areas of science which will be critical to the industry in a future post-Brexit. This will entail close interaction and discussion with all our stakeholders – plans for a number of stakeholder engagement events are already well advanced, and I look forward to these discussions.

On this note, I wish you a very merry Christmas and a prosperous and healthy New Year.

Sinclair Mayne

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