Wendy Wintersteen is winding down her time as president of Iowa State University. Her retirement on Jan. 2 marks a nearly five-decade career at the university.
Shortly after earning a bachelor’s degree in crop protection from Kansas State University, Wintersteen joined ISU Extension and Outreach in 1979 as a specialist in integrated pest management.
“In Extension, I really found a family of educators that was focused on not only delivering great research-based information from the university, but also listening to farmers, community members and having that be a two-way street,” Wintersteen said.
Wintersteen earned a Ph.D. in entomology from ISU in 1988 and became an assistant professor the same year. After a brief departure from 1989 to 1990 to serve as the National Pesticide Education Program leader for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Extension Service, Wintersteen returned to ISU, where she rose through the ranks of academia.
Starting in 2006, she served as dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and director of the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station.
The Board of Regents selected Wintersteen in October 2017 to become the university’s 16th president. She is the first woman and second ISU alum in the role.
“Personally, it's always been about serving our students and helping them succeed,” Wintersteen said. “I can measure that when we look at rankings that really reflect how we're serving our students.”
Wintersteen said that includes an 89% student retention rate, which refers to students returning after their first year. That’s 10 percentage points above the national average for four-year public universities, according to the 2025 Persistence and Retention report.
“We're doing something right in really helping our students have a great experience, that they're able to come back and continue to study, and then our graduation rate continues to be very high,” she said.
Wintersteen also pointed to metrics from the Wall Street Journal/College Pulse 2026 Best Colleges in the U.S. list. The ranking focuses heavily on student outcomes, including the cost of attending versus graduate salaries, along with the learning environment and diversity.
The Des Moines Register reported Iowa State ranked highest among post-secondary schools in the state at No. 141. However, both ISU and the University of Iowa received lower diversity scores and overall rankings compared to 2025.
A state law passed last year restricts diversity, equity and inclusion programs at Iowa’s public universities. Iowa State closed its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Office, eliminating several positions and diverting nearly $800,000, according to The Gazette.
Wintersteen said Iowa State will always comply with state law and directives from the Board of Regents while continuing to be a welcoming place.
“We have our Cyclone Support programming; we have centers to help our students,” Wintersteen said. “We welcome everyone, just like we did from the very beginning, and that's how we will go forward into the future.”
During her tenure, Wintersteen made innovation and entrepreneurship a priority, leading to new programs, an $84 million Student Innovation Center and national and international recognition.
She also led the university through the COVID-19 pandemic, which included rapidly shifting classes online in the spring of 2020 and developing protocols for staff, faculty and students to return in the fall.
“That was a tremendous effort on everybody's part, and we learned a lot,” Wintersteen said.
Wintersteen said she was proud of the university’s response and that it’s now more prepared to move quickly to virtual processes if it needs to in the future. But she said there was a social cost with the pandemic, exposing the need to make sure students are engaged in clubs, organizations and other groups on campus.
Wintersteen and her husband plan to travel after her retirement and will continue to live in Iowa.
David Spalding, dean of ISU’s Ivy College of Business, will serve as interim president until incoming president David Cook takes the helm in March.
Wintersteen’s advice to Cook is to “rely on a great team of leaders, faculty and staff" at ISU that are there to support the president.
"We really are positioned to move forward into the future,” she added.
