Randy Wisser joined UD's faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2009. He earned his Ph.D. in Plant Breeding and Genetics from Cornell, which was followed by a postdoctoral stint at NCSU. His research interests include genetic diversity of plants and their pathogens and environmental adaptation, development of new genetic analysis methods, and translational research for crop improvement.

rjw@udel.edu

Teclemariam (Tecle) Weldekidan is a Research Scientist and plant breeding guru. He earned his M.S. at UD in Plant Science. Tecle brings over 20 yrs of experience in maize breeding to the group. He is involved in multiple projects including studies on the genetics of environmental adaptation, resposne to artificial selection, and quantitative disease resistance. Tecle is also instrumental in training students in plant breeding.

tecle@udel.edu

Megan Patzoldt is a Research Associate. She earned her Ph.D. in Plant Breeding from UI Urbana-Champaign. She joined our group after working in crop breeding and genetics at BASF in NC. Megan is our molecular lab leader.

patzoldt@udel.edu

Meredith Biedrzycki is a Postdoctoral Researcher. She earned her Ph.D. from UD where she worked on plant-plant interactions. Now she is leading the bioimaging work on an NSF-funded project aimed relating genetics of quantitative resistance to cellular-level mechanisms of defense.

mlbiedrz@udel.edu

Juliana Teixeira is a Postdoctoral Researcher. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Genetics and Plant Breeding in Brazil (at UFLA in Lavras and ESALQ in São Paulo, respectively) and was working at Fibria on molecular breeding of Eucalyptus before joining the lab.  Juliana is leading the analysis of combining selection and association mapping to  characterize a population subjected to a decade pf phenotypic selection for temperate adaptation.

Yes, pão de queijo, feijoada, caipirinha's...

juliana@udel.edu

Kip Rogers is a Ph.D. student working on maize adaptation and respose to artificial selection.  While completing a B.S. degree in Agronomy at UW-Madison, Kip worked in the sweet corn breeding program of Dr. Bill Tracy and conducted population genetics research of white-tailed deer in Dr. Michael Samuel's lab.

krogers@udel.edu

Felix Francis is a Ph.D. student in UD's new program of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology (CBCB at UD). His dissertation is focused on characterizing genetic diversity at quantitative resistance loci in maize.

ffrancis@udel.edu

Fabiano Perina is a Ph.D. student from Brazil (UFLA) who is here on a fellowship to study the cellular basis of quantitative resistance in maize.

perina@udel.edu

Naveen Kumar is an M.S. student in Computer and Information Sciences. He is developing data management systems for plant breeding and genetics data. Naveen also develops Maize ATLAS project website (www.maizeatlas.org).

nkumar@udel.edu

Rithika Gogineni is an M.S. student in Computer and Information Sciences. She recently joined our group and is collaborating with Naveen on data management systems for plant breeding research.

rithikag@udel.edu

Lauren Stewart-Brown is double majoring in Agriculture & Natural Resource and Food Science. Lauren works on our USDA-NIFA ATLAS project.

PAST MEMBERS

Michael Jackson (Summer '10, '11, '12) is an undergraduate at Columbia University where he is majoring in Physics and Mathematics. With his geneticist hat on in our lab, he has helped to pollinate corn, develop high-throughput phenotyping protocols for fungi and worked on quantitative complementation analysis in maize.

Luisa Sawyer (2012) is an undergraduate in Entomology and Wildlife Ecology. She assisted on a project to characterize genetic diversity in lima bean.

Yogasudha (Sudha) Veturi (2009-2012) was research assistant turned M.S. student. Sudha's work thesis was on association mapping in recurrently selected populations. She is now pursuing her Ph.D. in statistical genetics at University of Alabama-Birmingham.

Sucharita (Suchi) Roy (2010-2011) worked on developing high-throughput image analysis pipelines for phenotyping fungal populations and methods for microbial population management. Her work was aimed at laying the groundowrk studying fungal quantitative genetics.

Nathan Adamson (2010) worked with us as a UD undergraduate and Summer Scholar. He  conducted a proof-of-concept experiment to test the use of complementation analysis for the identification of quantitative trait genes.

Joel Reiner (2011) did a stint in the lab, working on maize adaptation. Joel manages research projects as an employee of Pioneer HiBred.

Liew (Lyssa) Yee Row (Fall '10) worked to refine phenotyping pipelines aimed at characterizing fungal variaiton. Now she is off pursuing a degree in psychology. Best of luck Lyssa!

Andrew Kness (Summer '10) is a UD undergraduate majoring in Plant Science. Andrew worked in the lab assisting Megan Patzoldt in the development of a method for genotyping-by-sequencing in lima bean.

Kamedra McNeil (Summer '10) worked as an undergraduate in UD's 2nd CANR Summer Institute. Kamedra conducted a literature survey and summarized the current state of knowledge on the genic basis of photoperiodism in plants. She also helped establish a laboratory standard protocol for gDNA extraction. Kamedra is earning her degree in Molecular Biology from Winston-Salem State University.

Ramya Sridharan (2010) worked as a high school student on her senior honors project in our lab. She conducted the initial studies in our lab on quantitative complementation analysis (that N. Adamson followed up on). Ramya is now an undergraduate at UD pursuing an Engineering degree.

Yaqoob Thurston (Summer '09) worked as an undergraduate in UD's inagaural CANR Summer Institute. He conducted a pilot project on vascular variation in maize, an ongoing collaborative study with Professor Tom Pizollato. Yaqoob is now an M.S. student at Delaware State University—his hand drawings of maize vascular bundles actually paid off.

Sarah Simon (Summer '09) was the first undergraduate to join the lab. She helped establish our molecular lab. She conducted quality control genotyping for our maize germplasm. As a high school student she helped pollinate corn with Professor Jim Hawk, which we all agree that is what sealed the deal for her acceptance into MIT. She is pursuing her undergraduate degree in Biological Engineering.