Staff Spotlight

Dan Burden sees himself as ISU Extension and Outreach’s jack-of-all-trades.

“I’ve always told people that was because I did things no one wanted to do and went to places no one in their right minds would go,” Burden, program coordinator for international and special projects said.

Burden worked for several years with private foundations and USAID on reforestation and infrastructure development with tribal farmers in eastern Afghanistan. While working in Afghanistan in 2005 he got an idea to apply short-rotation poplar trees for construction beams and as fodder for community resource development. The idea was picked up by the U.S. military’s agricultural development and provincial reconstruction teams who implemented the idea across the country.