Special Seminar “Crossing Boundaries Through Modeling: Understanding How Populations Adapt to Novel Environments.”
Special Seminar Sponsored by the Raymond F. Baker Center for Plant Breeding
“Crossing Boundaries Through Modeling: Understanding How Populations Adapt to Novel Environments.”
Randall Wisser, Research Director, in the Plant Biology and Breeding division of INRAE (the National Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment)
Tuesday, November 18th, 2025
Agronomy 3140, 3:00-5:00pm
Seminar Description: What determines how populations adapt to different environments? This seminar addresses how genotype-environment interactions create the phenotypic space for evolution, and how changes due to evolution and the environment reciprocally restructure these interactions. Demonstrated through research on flowering time in maize, I will discuss how a digital-life modeling approach—combining evolutionary genetic and mechanistic crop models—helps us understand this dynamic process, and potentially predict the adaptive trajectories of plant populations. This confronts our current knowledge of genetic, plastic, and evolutionary processes while creating new opportunities for understanding and managing adaptation. A broader theme is that meta-modeling provides a framework for scientific convergence.
Dr. Randall Wisser is a Research Director in the Plant Biology and Breeding division of INRAE (the National Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment) in Montpellier, France. He is also an affiliate faculty member at the University of Delaware in the USA, where he previously spent a decade establishing a research program focused on maize genetics and developing innovative active learning approaches in plant biology. Dr. Wisser completed his PhD in Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University and was a USDA-AFRI postdoctoral fellow at North Carolina State University.
At INRAE's Laboratory of Ecophysiology of Plants under Environmental Stress, Dr. Wisser investigates population adaptation across environments and how plants respond to stress. Building on his work in maize, he combines experimental studies with digital tools and data science to understand these processes at multiple biological scales. He has led multi-institutional projects resulting in the creation of novel experimental systems and approaches for studying adaptation and disease resistance, and the release of registered breeding populations for maize diversification. His current research centers on convergence of quantitative genetics and plant ecophysiology to advance breeding strategies for adaptation.