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AMES, IOWA - An Oregon State University professor will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Iowa State University for his achievements in agricultural economics and contributions to improving rural life in America.

Emery Castle, one of the founders of the field of resource economics, will receive the degree this Saturday, Dec. 20, at Iowa State's fall undergraduate commencement ceremony in Ames, Iowa.

From 1976 until 1986, Castle served as vice president and then president of Resources for the Future, a Washington, D.C., public policy research institute. The institute conducts investigations of natural resource and environmental policy issues of national significance.

A year after he retired from Resources for the Future, Castle obtained funding from the Kellogg Foundation to establish the National Rural Studies Committee, which he still chairs. The aim of the committee is to increase the attention given by higher education to issues of concern to rural America.

The native Kansan, who earned a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Iowa State in 1952, has held many positions at Oregon State.

In his first stint at the university, from 1954 until 1976, he served as a faculty member in OSU's Department of Agricultural Economics (1954-65), dean of faculty (1965-66), director of OSU's Water Resources Institute (1966-69), head of the Department of Agricultural Economics (1966-72) and dean of the Graduate School (1972-76).

He returned to OSU in 1986, helping establish and becoming the first chair of the university's Graduate Faculty of Economics. During his years at Oregon State, Castle has conducted numerous studies of natural resource issues in the state through OSU's Agricultural Experiment Station and Extension Service.

Also honored at Iowa State's fall commencement, with an honorary Doctor of Science degree, will be Edwin Krebs, co-winner in 1992 of a Nobel Prize in the Physiology or Medicine category.