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Symposium Speakers

Dr. Ivan Baxter is a Principal Investigator and Member at the Donald Danforth Plant Sciences Center in St. Louis, Missouri. He received a BA in Chemistry from Goucher College and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Structure and Chemistry from The Scripps Research Institute before moving on to a postdoc at Purdue University. Dr. Baxter studies how plants adapt to their abiotic environment using elemental profiling, image based phenotyping, metabolomics, quantitative genetics and bioinformatics.

Dr. Clare Casteel is an Associate Professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. The research program of Dr. Casteel focuses on viral pathogens of plants and vector-borne plant pathogens and investigates the ecological and molecular intricacies between virus-host and virus-vector-host interactions. By employing diverse experimental approaches such as genomics, biochemistry, and proteomics, her research program aims to decipher the molecular basis of plant defense responses to viruses and vectors. Using forward and reverse genetics, and proteomics, aspects of plant-virus-vector interactions are investigated. This research is important for plant breeding as it provides insights for breeding crops with enhanced resistance to viral diseases, reducing crop losses, and promoting organic agriculture. Dr. Casteel’s research contributes to broadening the understanding of plant-microbe interactions within complex communities, highlighting the need to delve deeper into the molecular mechanisms governing these interactions to develop more sustainable controls for plant pathogens in the future. 

Dr. Diego Jarquin is an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL. One of the biggest challenge of the humanity is to ensure the current and future food supply chain of a growing population in a world that is facing more often and extreme environmental variations. The contributions of Dr. Jarquin research program are relevant to the society because these are helping to the development of improved (more productive, resistant to biotic and abiotic stress, etc.) genotypes by the integrating artificial intelligence (AI) methods and multi-omics analyses in plant breeding. Dr. Jarquin's program is focused on the development of interpretable AI methods and related disciplines (biostatistics, quantitative genetics, and modeling) that can be applied to large multi-omics data sets for providing solutions to complex plant breeding and plant systems biology questions. More specifically, these developments are oriented to find new ways of driving genetic improvement and biological insights designing and optimizing methods for plant breeding, leveraging information from multiple facets of plant biology—physiology, agronomy, and biochemistry to quantitative genetics and multi-omics (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and high throughput phenotyping).

Dr. Jamie O’Rourke is a Research Geneticist with the USDA-ARS in Ames, IA. Dr. O’Rourke’s research is focused on improving crop yields and mitigating losses to biotic and abiotic stress which is critical to food security. While crop production must support continued population growth, it must also become more sustainable, with fewer inputs and reduced environmental impact. Her research seeks to understand how plants alter gene expression patterns and associated biological networks in response to iron and phosphorus deficiency to survive low nutrient growth conditions. Dr. O’Rourke’s research program uses a suite of functional genomic tools including RNA sequencing and virus induced gene silencing (VIGS) to identify and characterize genes responding to abiotic stress. Gene expression networks and associate specific biological pathways with stress tolerance have been visualized using bioinformatics.  Her work has identified the hallmarks of the soybean iron deficiency stress response and demonstrated that micro and macro-nutrients affect the same biological pathways and that multiple stress exposures alter gene expression patterns from those observed after a single stress event, suggesting plants can prime stress responses. These findings have important implications for plant breeding programs working on improved abiotic stress tolerance. Understanding the biological pathways associated with stress tolerance will facilitate the development of cultivars with enhanced stress tolerance and improved nutrient use efficiency.

Dr. Radu Totir has received his undergraduate degree in Animal Science from Universitatea de Stiinte Agricole si Medicina Veterinara, Cluj-Napoca, Romania followed by a Ph.D. in Animal Breeding and Genetics from Iowa State University (ISU). After two years as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Animal Breeding and Genetics group at ISU, Radu joined DuPont Pioneer (now Corteva Agriscience) on October 01, 2004. He is currently Biostatistics and Scientific Computing Lead within the Breeding Technologies Department of the Seed Product Development (SPD) organization at Corteva Agriscience. In his current role, Radu works with teams of applied statisticians and computer scientists to integrate cross-functional applied science into high throughput genetic evaluation and product characterization software systems for Corteva’s SPD breeding teams. Specifically, in partnership with other technical groups across the organization, we are responsible for the optimal conversion of global high volume SPD research data streams: field, genomic and environmental, into actionable insights that help Corteva design, create and deliver, to our global customers, industry leading seed products.  

Dr. Jinliang Yang (杨金良) is an Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees from China Agricultural University and a Ph.D. from Iowa State University. He then conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California on maize evolutionary genetics. Starting in 2017, he became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture, working on plant genetics and genomics. In 2023, he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed papers on journal such as Nature Communications, eLife, and PLOS Genetics, with a total citation of over 1,700 and an h-index of 18 to date.

Boris Alladassi Boris Alladassi is a Ph.D. student in Plant Breeding with a Statistics minor at Iowa State University. He is working on two research projects in Dr. Jianming Yu’s lab. The first combines UAV-based high-throughput phenotyping and functional QTL mapping to investigate the dynamics of plant height genetics across development in sorghum. The second integrates genomic and transcriptomic analyses to dissect the genetics of leaf angle across canopy in maize. Boris received a B.S. in Agronomic Sciences from Université d’Abomey-Calavi, Benin, and an M.S. in Plant Breeding and Seed Systems from Makerere University, Uganda. Boris has been actively involved in the leadership of many student organizations. He served on the organizing committee for the R.F. Baker Plant Breeding Symposium for four years, including his tenure as co-chair in 2022. He is the current College Chair for the College of Agriculture and Life Science at the Graduate and Professional Students Senate. Boris enjoys spending quality time with his family, cycling, hiking, and playing logic games.

Raissa Fon Na-ahRaissa Fon is a research scholar in Plant Genomics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 2021. As a Ph.D student at the University of Yaoundé1 (UY1), Cameroon, she was privileged to be funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation Grant. She delved passionately into the world of plant biology during a master’s degree at the UY1, in 2014, an interest that had evolved by the end of her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2010) at the University of Buea after she got cues to answering her questions on “how to produce resistant varieties driven by DNA technology”.