2025 Invited Speakers
Thank you to invited speakers for sharing their exciting research!
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Rex Bernardo
University of Minnesota
Rex Bernardo is a Distinguished University Teaching Professor and endowed chair in maize breeding and genetics at the University of Minnesota. He obtained his undergraduate degree in the Philippines in 1984 and his Ph.D. degree in plant breeding from the University of Illinois in 1988. Dr. Bernardo developed the widely used genomic best linear unbiased prediction or GBLUP procedure in 1994, and most of his work has focused on marker-assisted breeding. Dr. Bernardo is director of the Plant Breeding Center at Minnesota, has written two textbooks, and teaches graduate courses in plant breeding and in professional skills for scientists as well as a freshman seminar course on coffee.
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Seeta Sistla
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
Seeta Sistla is an Associate Professor in Natural Resources Management and Environmental Sciences at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA. Dr. Sistla’s scholarship focuses on understanding how land systems respond to environmental and management changes and how these responses can feed back to affect critical environmental processes like carbon sequestration. She received her PhD from UCSB focusing on terrestrial biogeochemical responses to warming in arctic systems and was a NOAA Climate and Global Change postdoctoral fellow at UC Irvine. Dr. Sistla joined Cal Poly in 2019 where her lab’s research grew to include the study of the extent and consequences of plastic pollution in agricultural systems—a shift that reflects the pernicious expansion of plasticulture in CA and across the world.
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Tawanda Gara
Cal Poly Humboldt
Tawanda Gara is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science and Management at Cal Poly Humboldt, where he teaches in the geospatial interdisciplinary program. His research interests lie in GIScience, Earth Observation, and Spatial Statistics and their application in natural resources management, specifically forestry, agriculture, and environment (FORAGE).
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Shelby Ellison
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Dr. Shelby Ellison is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Plant and Agroecosystem Sciences at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Her research interests include preserving, characterizing, and utilizing genetic diversity in alternative crops to meet the needs of regional farmers. She is also interested in how human interactions with plants, through domestication and breeding, have altered the plant genome and how we can use these selection signatures to trace domestication and improvement throughout history.
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Adam Steinbrenner
University of Washington
Adam Steinbrenner studies plant immune systems, applying tools and models from plant immunity to understand their interactions with insect pests. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle.
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