Cassida Award Winner Response: impact of modern technology on graduate education in animal sciences.

I am humbled and honored to receive the L. E. Casida Award, especially because Dr. Casida was my mentor for the Ph.D. I thank the Awards Committee for selecting me as the recipient. I would not be qualified for this prestigious award had it not been for the efforts of my students. I feel this award belongs to them, too. I have been fortunate during my career in academia to have attracted excellent students to my laboratory. It has been a pleasure and intangible benefit to observe the intellectual transformation in logic and reasoning power that occurred during the tenure of their graduate education. As far as I know, all are, or have been, successfully engaged in work related to the livestock industry or the biological and medical sciences. I am proud of their many accomplishments. My mentoring skills and philosophy basically reflect those acquired by exposure to three individuals, who served as my mentors during my graduate career. I would like to briefly acknowledge these three individuals and their contributions to my mentoring philosophy. Dr. Ralph Erb served as my major professor for the Master of Science degree. His dedication to science and his work ethic made a lasting impression on me. During my association with Dr. Erb in the late 1950s, he had acquired from Carnation Milk Farms (Carnation, Washington) 25 yr of clinical records on the reproductive characteristics of their Holstein cows. For the years I was in his laboratory as an undergraduate and then his graduate student, he literally spent day and night compiling the data and subjecting it to statistical evaluation using one of those old-fashioned mechanical calculators that would rattle and roll for what seemed like an eternity before providing an answer. His endeavors with those herd records served as an example of how to maximize use of data. From his efforts came some of the first data on factors affecting reproduction in high-producing dairy cows (Morrison and Erb, 1957). During my junior year at Washington State University, I was hired by Dr. Erb to wash the laboratory