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Alum shows you can go anywhere from here, but you can always come back home 

In the early 2000s, �ձ�av��Ƶ used the tagline “You can go anywhere from here” in a number of ads to feature students and alumni who used �ձ�av��Ƶ as a launching pad to a variety of study abroad locations and high-profile careers. 

One of the featured students was Ryan Lefers, a farm kid from Corsica studying agricultural engineering, who had participated in a study abroad program in Egypt. The North African country would be just the start of Lefers’ Middle Eastern adventures. 

After his commercial debut, Lefers earned his bachelor’s (2004) and master’s (2006) degrees under the tutelage of then undergraduate advisor and now Klingbeil Endowed Department Head and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering Kasiviswanathan “Muthu” Muthukumarappan and his master’s (2006) under now retired assistant professor Richard Nicolai. Lefers went on to work as an environmental engineer in Minnesota for seven years, making frequent trips back to his parents’ dairy and crop farm. Eventually, Lefers’ anywhere pulled him much farther east. 

Lefers went on to get his doctoral degree at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, a graduate school focused on research and innovation. 

“My Ph.D. work focused on, essentially, how do you grow food in a place where there is no water?” Lefers said. “How do you overcome the challenges of the desert environment where it is incredibly hot?” 

Lefers’ farm roots and engineering training combined to guide his work. His dissertation research found a way to use an indoor environment’s humidity to water plants, allowing fresh food to be produced indoors in parts of the world where temperatures or limited land don’t allow for traditional agriculture like he had grown up with. No longer a regular visitor or harvest field hand, Lefers still managed to make it back to South Dakota every year, with the exception of 2020, when COVID-19 travel restrictions prevented him from leaving the campus he worked on. 

Immediately after finishing his Ph.D., Lefers co-founded the company Red Sea Farms, now called iyris. Based on his own description of his Ph.D. work, it should be no surprise that his company is known for two products: one that prevents greenhouses from overheating and one that increases the drought resilience in tomatoes and other annual vegetable crops. 

“The company is focused on bringing sustainable agricultural technologies to market,” Lefers explained. “We work to get more yield in hot, dry places by developing technology that saves water and other nutrients when growing plants, allowing fresh local food to be grown in a sustainable way.” 

Working as co-founder and CEO of iyris brought Lefers back to the United States, Arizona, specifically. While this got him 6,000 miles closer, leading the company’s plant genetics division made Lefers itch to return to an academic environment and opened up the door for a return home. 

On Sept. 25, Lefers was announced as the second Griffith Endowed Chair in Agriculture and Water Resources Management at �ձ�av��Ƶ. 

“It’s a significant honor to be here in an endowed position. I feel really honored, blessed, fortunate and humbled a bit that I can come back like this,” Lefers, also director of the South Dakota Water Resources Institute and an �ձ�av��Ƶ Extension specialist, said. “I’m just hoping that I can live up to the title and give back a bit. Develop new technology and research but also serve the people of South Dakota.” 

The Griffith Endowed Chair is named for William and Byrne Griffith, who generously support �ձ�av��Ƶ in many ways through the William Mibra and Byrne Smith Griffith Foundation. This specific chair is located within the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering and is designed to connect water resources and outreach efforts with organizations across South Dakota. 

“I haven’t had the opportunity to live here since graduating, so I’m excited to reconnect, build my network and really understand how stakeholders view and use water resources,” Lefers said. “I’m just really excited to be here, to be back home.”