KEMPTVILLE — Dr. Rennée Bergeron has been appointed interim director of the Kemptville Campus of the University of Guelph. She will continue as director of Alfred College, a position she has held since May 1, 2007.

Over the next year, she will spend two days a week at Kemptville and three days at Alfred, a French-speaking agricultural college, east of Ottawa.

Bergeron lives on a hobby farm at Vankleek Hill.

Born and raised in Quebec City, she has a bachelor of science in Agriculture from Laval University and a master’s degree in animal nutrition. She obtained her PhD at the University of Illinois and wrote her thesis on "Abnormal behaviour in gestating sows."

Before coming to Alfred, she taught and did research for 12 years at Laval. Besides her duties at the colleges, she will supervise six graduate students.

She sees Kemptville College as a teaching facility where the equipment is short of being state-of-the-art. She expects much of that to be remedied shortly, most notably with the building of a new, robotic, milking facility for 60 cows. Equine and agronomic facilities at Kemptville are top notch.

She says Kemptville will introduce a new diploma in Agri-food Leadership in 2010 and re-introduce the Food Nutrition and Risk Management diploma in the fall. The course was discontinued two years ago because enrollment was down.

Bergeron replaces Dr. Michael Goss who retired last month. He was 65.

In his four years at Kemptville, Goss established a number of collaborative projects with industry, including crop research for Lafarge in Napanee, planning to replace the 100,000 tonnes of coal used in its plant with biomass. He brought a strong background in environmental research to Kemptville.