Dr. Bill Erysian serves as Director of Grants and International Projects for the Jordan College of Agricultural Sciences and Technology at Fresno State University. Concurrently, he holds the position of Director of the California State University Consortium for International Development, which he helped to establish in 2002. Bill has been involved in international agricultural development initiatives for more than 20 years and remains committed to the importance of international education and cultural diversity. He is a key architect and the director of the successful “Agricultural Development for Armed Forces Pre-deployment Training (ADAPT) program that is designed to provide practical training on essential food security information to US government personal deploying to under-governed regions. The ADAPT model stresses the importance of food security as a prerequisite to stability in under-governed countries and Bill remains a leading proponent of the concept that agriculture can be used as an entry point for stability and development in conflict/post conflict regions.

Bill is also author of the book, “The USDA Story: 12 Years of Partnership with Armenia,” where he has worked extensively in agrarian reform since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Prior to his career in higher education, Bill was a trained journalist who served in the London Bureau of ABC News and as an occasional correspondent for the Economist magazine. Later, he worked as Director of Corporate Public Affairs for the McDonnell Douglas Information Systems Group. He continues to be a tireless advocate of the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In addition to his undergraduate degree in journalism, Bill holds Post-Graduate degrees from the National University of Armenia and the London School of Economics and Political Science, where his focus of study was post-WWII international and comparative politics. He is married with two children.