Goff Named Anderson Chair in College of Veterinary Medicine

Iowa State University President Gregory L. Geoffroy, Jese Goff, Anderson Chair in Veterinary Medicine, and John Thomson, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine

AMES, Iowa — Jesse Goff, professor of biomedical sciences at Iowa State University, has been named the first recipient of the Anderson Chair in Veterinary Medicine in the College of Veterinary Medicine.

Goff joined the Iowa State veterinary medicine faculty in the fall of 2008 after a long career with the National Animal Disease Center in Ames. Goff’s research focuses on milk fever in dairy cows, examining the factors that contribute to immune suppression in newly calved cows. His research team has discovered this immune suppression contributes to diseases like retained placenta and metritis, both of which can cause infection, poor reproductive health and performance, and death.

The Iowa State veterinary medicine professor has also been researching the development of novel vitamin D compounds that might be used in the treatment and prevention of cancer in humans. He says the research may also prove useful in human autoimmune diseases such as Crohn’s disease in humans. As a veterinarian, Goff doesn’t conduct human trials. Instead he has been focusing his efforts to develop compounds based on tissue culture and animal models. He was recently awarded a $90,000 grant from the Grow Iowa Values Fund to work with GlycoMyr Inc. of Ames and Heartland Assays Inc. at the Iowa State Research Park to test synthesized vitamin D compounds as a treatment for inflammatory bowel disease.

A member of the American Dairy Science Association and the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research, Goff was named by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Research Service as an Early Career Research Scientist of the Year in 1991. He was awarded the Outstanding Research Award by the American Feed Industry Association in 1998 and the Nutrition Professionals Dairy Research Award in 2005.

He holds three degrees from Iowa State including a master’s of science in veterinary physiology, a doctor of veterinary medicine, and a dual Ph.D. in veterinary physiology and nutritional physiology from the animal science department. Goff earned his bachelor’s degree in biology from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

The Anderson Chair in Veterinary Medicine was established through an anonymous gift to Iowa State University. That gift was combined with $500,000 in matching funds from the State of Iowa offered through the Battelle Endowment in an effort to enhance the state’s biosciences, information technology and advanced manufacturing industries. This is one of four endowed faculty positions that have been established at Iowa State through the Battelle Challenge.

The gift is part of Campaign Iowa State: With Pride and Purpose, the university’s $800 million fundraising effort. More than $700 million in gifts and future commitments for facilities and student, faculty and programmatic support have been made to Campaign Iowa State.