Keynote & Lectureship Speakers
Keynote Panel Moderator
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is a Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry and Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences and Geology at the University of California, Merced. She previously served as the Director of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science (Senate confirmed, Presidential Nomination). Her research interest lies at the intersection of soil science, geochemistry, global change science, and political ecology. Professor Berhe’s work seeks to improve our understanding of how the soil system regulates the earth’s climate and the dynamic two-way relationship between soil and human communities. Numerous awards and honors have recognized her scholarly contributions and efforts to improve equity and inclusion in STEM. She is an Elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the Geological Society of America, and a member of the inaugural class of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine's New Voices in Science, Engineering, and Medicine.
Agricultural Economist/Climate Futurist
Jayson Lusk currently serves as Vice President and Dean of the Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources (OSU Agriculture) and Regents Professor at Oklahoma State University. He has served on the editorial councils of eight academic journals including the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and Food Policy and consulted for various nonprofits, government agencies, and agribusinesses. Jayson has further been honored by being elected to and serving on the executive committees of the three largest U.S. agricultural economics associations, including most recently the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, of which he is a past-president and fellow. In the wake of COVID-19, he has been interviewed by dozens of television, radio, and print journalist seeking information about food system impacts, including mentions in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN.com, FoxNews.com, Financial Times, LA Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, NPR, Freakonomics and more.
Philanthropist/Humanitarian
Stella Salvo is Head of Breeding Partnerships for Smallholder Farming at Bayer Crop Science, part of the Global Breeding organization in Research & Development. Based in St. Louis, Missouri, Stella is responsible for driving public-private partnerships seeking to make positive impacts for the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. Stella holds a PhD and Master of Science in Plant Breeding and Genetics from the University of Wisconsin and Colorado State University, respectively, along with a Bachelor of Science in International Agronomy with a minor in International Studies in Agriculture from Purdue University. In addition to serving the tri-societies as Chair of the Agronomic Science Foundation, Stella also serves on the Advisory Board to the International Rescue Committee Airbel Impact Lab on Seed Security and the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Soybean Value Chain Research.
Agricultural Technology Futurist
Scott Shearer received his Ph.D. in agricultural engineering from The Ohio State University (OSU) in 1986. Currently, he serves as Professor and Chair of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering at OSU. Highlights of his research career include development of methodologies and controls for metering and spatial applying crop production inputs, modeling of agricultural field machinery systems, autonomous multi-vehicle field production systems and strategies for deployment of UAVs in agriculture. He has lead research supported by over $15M in grants, authored more than 200 technical publications, and has made numerous invited presentations at international conferences, professional meetings and farmer forums. Dr. Shearer is a Fellow of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers.
Nyle C. Brady Frontiers of Soil Science Lectureship
Behzad Ghanbarian is an Associate Professor in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at the University of Texas at Arlington. He earned his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Isfahan University of Technology (Iran), University of Tehran (Iran), and Wright State University (US), respectively.
Behzad’s research interests center around a wide range of multidisciplinary topics, such as climate change, soil physics, complex systems, unconventional reservoirs, upscaling techniques, and fluid flow and solute transport in heterogeneous porous media.
He has authored or co-authored more than 125 refereed journal articles and three books. He is a member of AGU, SSSA, SPWLA and SPE and received the 2015 Donald L. Turcotte Award in nonlinear geophysics from the American Geophysical Union as well as the 2020 Soil Physics and Hydrology Division Early Career Award from the Soil Science Society of America. Behzad was also listed among the top 2% of scientists in the world between 2021 and 2024.
E.T. & Vam York Distinguished ASA Lectureship
Mitch Hunter is the Co-Director of the Forever Green Initiative at the University of Minnesota and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics. He earned his B.S. in Government from Harvard and his Ph.D. in Agronomy from Penn State.
Dr. Hunter oversees Forever Green’s portfolio of over 15 winter-hardy annual and perennial crops that protect soil and water while driving new economic opportunities for growers, industry, and rural communities. Species range from herbaceous perennials such as Kernza® perennial grain, to winter annuals (e.g., pennycress, camelina, barley), to hybrid hazelnut.
To build support for scaling Forever Green crops, Dr. Hunter works with coalitions of farmers, farm organizations, environmental NGOs, companies, agencies, and philanthropists, as well as the Minnesota Legislature.
Dr. Hunter’s research currently focuses on winter camelina and pennycress cropping systems. He has authored or co-authored 30 refereed journal articles.
"Diversification for Resilience: A Forever Green Revolution for the Next 40 Years"
Looking 40 Years into the Future, I see a wide range of challenges, and also tremendous possibilities. For the first time since the Green Revolution, world population growth is slowing down and will likely peak at 9-10 billion people by 2065. However, increasing prosperity, changing diets, and a renewed interest in biofuels are likely to continue driving up demand for agricultural products. Despite global mitigation efforts, climate change will lead to compounding effects on our weather patterns, growing seasons, soils, and crops. The most likely outcome is that erosion, water quality degradation, biodiversity loss, and pest pressures will accelerate. We cannot accept this future. As agronomists, we must contribute solutions that are profound, systemic, highly scalable, productive, and profitable across the agricultural value chain—a New Green Revolution. Luckily, we already know what this can look like. From perennial rice to intermediate oilseed crops to agroforestry, we have models of truly sustainable intensification of agriculture. By coupling advanced breeding and genomics with cropping system agronomy and ecosystem science, this community of scientists can unlock solutions that are both transformative and practical, improving the lives of millions and the functioning of the biosphere.
Betty Klepper Endowed Lectureship
Roger Thurow is a journalist and author who writes about the persistence of hunger and malnutrition in our world. He was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal for 30 years, including 20 years as a foreign correspondent based in Europe and Africa. In 2003, he and Journal colleague Scott Kilman wrote a series of stories on famine in Africa that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. Thurow is the author of four books: Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty (with Scott Kilman); The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change; The First 1,000 Days: A Crucial Time for Mothers and Children – And the World; and, Against the Grain – How Farmers Around the Globe Are Transforming Agriculture to Nourish the World and Heal the Planet. He has also been a senior fellow for Global Agriculture and Food Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, as well as a Scholar-in-Residence at Auburn University’s Hunger Solutions Institute.
"Confronting Humanity's Great Challenge: Nourishing the World and Healing the Planet"
Let’s listen to the wisdom of smallholder, Indigenous, and family farmers who are seeing their farming turn against them. They have experienced their lands degrading, their soils depleting, their waters dwindling, their pollinators fleeing, their biodiversity shrinking, their rains becoming ever more mercurial and their temperatures ever hotter. And their children and their communities becoming ever hungrier and malnourished. They find themselves at the center of the great collision of humanity’s two supreme imperatives: Nourish the world, and Preserve/Protect/Heal the planet from the very actions of nourishing us all. Out of desperation, these farmers have begun farming against the grain of modern agriculture orthodoxy to reconcile their roles as both food producers and stewards of the land. They are pushing forward with the practices of agroforestry, agroecology, and regenerative agriculture -- farming with nature instead of bending it to their will. These are the stories of the farmers in my Against the Grain book...and lessons for us all.
Ron Phillips Plant Genetics Lectureship
Edward S. Buckler is a USDA-ARS Distinguished Research Geneticist and adjunct professor in Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell University with an educational background in molecular evolution and archaeology. His group's research uses genomic, computational, and field approaches to dissect complex traits and accelerate breeding in maize, sorghum, cassava, and a wide range of other crops. With these technologies applied to over 2000 species, now the Buckler group focuses on exploring ways to re-engineer global agricultural production systems to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ensure food security, improve nutrition, and respond to climate change. With the USDA-ARS, he leads an informatics and genomics platform to help accelerate breeding for specialty crops and animals. His contributions to quantitative genetics and genomics were recognized with election to the US National Academy of Sciences, recipient of the inaugural NAS Food and Agriculture Award, and the McClintock Prize.
"Triple Gains: A Systems Approach to Nitrogen, Yields, and Sustainability from Field to Food System"
Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer has driven incredible gains in crop productivity, yet only 12% of applied nitrogen reaches consumers as protein. Today, with a systems-level understanding of soils, plant and animal physiology, manure, synthetic biology, and metagenomics, we can design nitrogen flows for both greater efficiency and lower environmental impact. The Nitrogen 2.0 framework outlines pathways to triple system-level nitrogen use efficiency, increase yields, and cut inputs—by integrating alternative nitrogen sources for livestock, improving manure recycling, and creating cropping systems that retain and reuse more nitrogen on-farm. One example is the Circular Economy that Reimagines Corn Agriculture (CERCA), which focuses on making maize extremely productive and efficient for feed, starch, and fuel uses (60% of the global crop). In temperate climates, maize faces two inefficiencies: it grows poorly in spring when light and nitrogen are available, and it allocates excessive nitrogen to low-value storage proteins in the grain. CERCA addresses this by designing a cold-tolerant maize, shifting nitrogen away from grain protein, and enhancing soil nitrogen recycling and in soil stability through biological nitrification inhibition. Together, these strategies lay the groundwork for a resilient, nitrogen-efficient agricultural system—maximizing productivity while reducing fertilizer input costs and environmental impact.
Calvin Sperling Memorial Biodiversity Lectureship
Jonathan F. Wendel is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology at Iowa State University. His research focuses on mechanisms underlying plant genomic and phenotypic diversify, with a special focus on the phenomenon of whole genome doubling, or polyploidy.
Most of his ~350 publications focus on the cotton genus (Gossypium), in which two diploid and two polyploid species were each independently domesticated thousands of years ago. This natural evolutionary diversification, followed by parallel strong directional selection under domestication, provide a model framework for exploring the comparative basis of domestication, the origin of form and of diversity in nature, and the evolutionary consequences of genome doubling. His research has helped shape the field, as documented in citation metrics (Google Scholar ~56,000 citations; h-index of 113).
Professor Wendel’s contributions have been recognized in all three major domains of professorial life: Master Teacher (2005) for his role as graduate mentor and educator; Outstanding Achievement in Departmental Leadership (2009), for leadership excellence during his 16 years (2002-2017) as department chair; and Distinguished Professor (2012) for national research prominence. His work has garnered national recognition, including election as an AAAS Fellow (2010), Distinguished Fellow of the Botanical Society of America (2015), Distinguished Scholar, Crop Science Society of America, (2015), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023), and the United States National Academy of Sciences (2023).
"Genes, Jeans, Genomes, and the Wondrous Cycles of Polyploidy in Cotton"
One of the signal realizations of the genomics era is that all flowering plants are polyploid, varying in the number and relative antiquity of their recurrent whole-genome doubling events. Gossypium, the cotton genus, exemplifies this episodic polyploidization, with both ancient polyploidy and more recent neoallopolyploids that originated following a biological reunion 1-2 MYA of divergent diploids from different hemispheres.
This serendipitous merger between diploid genomes that vary two-fold in size generated myriad genomic and transcriptomic responses, which serve as models for understanding evolutionary processes following allopolyploidy. Genomic processes include homoeologous exchange, gene silencing, intergenomic gene conversion, and novel cytonuclear interactions. Allopolyploid formation also induces complex transcriptomic responses, including genome-wide modification of genic expression, co-expression patterns, and cis- and trans-controls governing duplicate gene expression. Cyclical, recurring polyploidy occurring over time scales ranging from hundreds to millions of years sets in motion processes that lead to genome downsizing, genomic fractionation, and chromosomal diploidization.
This polyploidy-induced dynamism, observed in Gossypium, is episodically and variably reiterated throughout the angiosperms. A major challenge is to connect these long and short-term processes to our understanding of the genotype-to-phenotype equation, and hence the adaptive role of polyploidy and its importance to the generation of biodiversity and to agriculture.
Leo M. Walsh Soil Fertility Distinguished Lectureship
Kevin Bronson is Emeritus Professor Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Retired, Supervisory Res. Soil Scientist, USDA-ARS. He received his BS, MS, PhD from the University of Maryland, the University of the Philippines, and Auburn University, respectively.
His research was on row crop nitrogen (N) cycling and management, site-specific N management, soil greenhouse gas mitigation management, irrigation and N management, and N soil/crop management in Asia.
Dr. Bronson has authored or co-authored 103 refereed journal articles, 72 abstracts, and 47 extension publications and software apps.
He served as associate editor for Soil Science Society of AmericaJournal, and Senior Associate Editor of the Agronomy Journal. Dr, Bronson also served on the Scientific Committee for the Precision Agriculture Conferences, USDA-China MOST Water-Savings Technology Project, Regional Technical Committee Rice-Wheat Consortium for Indo-Gangetic Plains (CGIAR), and the USDA-NRCS Technical Committee of Arizona..
"Nitrogen Soil and Crop Management from 1981-2021 and Looking to the Next 40 Years"
I caught the ‘Nitrogen (N) bug’ extracting/steam distilling soils for N as an undergraduate student in Beltsville, MD. An interest in international ag led me to conduct my MS research on legume green manures at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines. This fit well with the emphasis in the 1980s on “Low-input agriculture”. IRRI was leading the world in the ‘Green Revolution’, N-15 balance studies/ N2O+N2 fluxes/ and NH3 flux-gradient losses > 40 %. My PhD was on nitrification/urease inhibitors or “enhanced efficiency fertilizers”. I never stopped working on EEFs. N2O/CH4 emissions were a theme throughout my career. In mid-1990s we showed a 2-wk drainage of flooded rice suppressed CH4 flux while not enhancing N2O flux, when timed between urea doses. Cover-cropping/conservation tillage grew dramatically in the 1980s/1990s. In 2001 we reported the need for an extra 30 kg N ha-1 for cotton after rye cover crops to prevent N immobilization. A N soil test has been the “Holy Grail” of N soil science for > 60 years. In Texas/Arizona we developed a 0-60/90-cm pre-plant soil NO3 test for cotton. Center-pivot/subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) have grown dramatically in US/worldwide. We reported N recovery efficiency (RE) as: furrow< center-pivot< SDI. High-frequency N fertigations reduced NO3 leaching/N2O flux and increased RE up to 90% in SDI. EEFs were most beneficial with furrow irrigations’ one/two N splits. Canopy reflectance can guide in-season N fertilizer doses, and reduce N rates. Looking to the next 40 years, more inter-disciplinary N research with plant breeders/irrigation scientists etc. is critical. N2O/CH4 flux work, including field-scale eddy covariance, must continue. USDA/US land-grant collaboration with international universities/governments/CGIAR centers must strengthen/continue, after the sharp decline from the 1970s/1980s TROPSOILS/Soil Management CRSPs period.
