University of Georgia

2022 Speaker Bios

	John R. Clark John R. Clark is a distinguished professor of horticulture at the University of Arkansas. He has worked in the fruit breeding program since joining the University of Arkansas in 1980. Crops he has worked with include blackberries, table grapes, wine and muscadine grapes, blueberries, and peaches/nectarines. He has developed more than 60 varieties of various fruits. He has been recognized for his efforts including induction in the Arkansas Agriculture Hall of Fame, the Impact Award by the National Association of Plant Breeders, named a Fellow of the American Society for Horticultural Science, and Distinguished Service Award, North American Raspberry and Blackberry Association.
	Scott Jackson Scott Jackson spent ten years at Purdue University and nine years at the University of Georgia before moving to Bayer Crop Science in 2019. Jackson currently leads a team that designs and optimizes breeding pipelines.
	Amy Kelly Amy Kelly received her Ph.D. in Animal Sciences from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. After graduate school she moved to the Washington D.C. metro area to complete a postdoc in Bioinformatics at the National Institutes of Health, and then worked as a Research Geneticist for the US Department of Agriculture in Peoria, IL studying crop pathogen genomics. Amy was hired as a Data Scientist by Monsanto in 2018, and is currently the Prescriptive Genomics Team Lead in Bayer’s Global Breeding division. In her spare time, Amy enjoys coaching her daughter’s pee wee soccer team and exploring her hometown of St. Louis, MO for good eats and quality booze.
	Jenny Kimball Jenny is originally from the finger lakes region of upstate New York. She obtained her BA in biology at Ithaca College in Ithaca, NY. After working in Dr. Susan McCouch's rice genetics program at Cornell University for several years, Jenny completed her Masters and PhD degrees at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC in Dr. Susana Milla-Lewis' turfgrass breeding & genetics program. She then joined Dr. Peter Balint-Kurti’s maize disease program at NCSU as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2017, she was hired as an assistant professor in the Dept. of Agronomy & Plant Genetics at the University of Minnesota to work on wild rice. Jenny is a self-proclaimed crazy basset hound lady who loves to cook, garden, and wrangle her two young kids to the best of her ability.
	Jianxin Ma Jianxin Ma is a Professor and Soybean Geneticist in the Department of Agronomy and a member of Center for Plant Biology at Purdue University. He earned his Ph.D. in Plant Genetics and Breeding from Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1999, and was trained in Plant Comparative and Evolutionary Genomics as a postdoctoral associate in Dr. Jeff Bennetzen lab at Purdue University (2000-2013) and the University of Georgia (2003-2005). He returned Purdue as a Research Geneticist in Dr. Scott Jackson lab in 2005, and promoted to Research Assistant Professor in 2006. He became an Assistant Professor in 2007, and promoted to full Professor in 2015. He was a recipient of Purdue University Faculty Scholar (2012-2017) and Purdue Agricultural Research Awards (2016). He was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018 and a Fellow of the Crop Science Society of America in 2021. His lab uses a combination of comparative, computational, and experimental genomics and molecular approaches to address the mechanistic basis that underlies structural and functional genomic changes in flowering plants, and to dissect soybean traits of agronomic importance in soybean, including plant architecture, traits associated with yield potential and environmental resilience, disease resistance, as well as domestication-related traits. Recently, his lab has expanded research interest by including understanding of regulatory mechanisms underlying Rhizobia-legume symbiosis and transferring of basic findings into soybean improvement through genome editing. He has authored over a hundred publications in high-impact journals, including Science, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Genetics, and Nature Plants, PNAS, Plant Cell etc., and served on the editorial board of several scientific journals including the Plant Journal, Plant Genome, and G3. He is the primary inventor on three patents and patent applications.
	Chris Saski View Profile Page (Clemson University)
	Shan Wu Shan Wu obtained her PhD in 2015 from the Ohio State University, where she studied tomato fruit development in the van der Knaap lab, before she joined the Fei lab at the Boyce Thompson Institute of Cornell University as a postdoc researcher to develop genomic resources that facilitate crop improvement. She has contributed to generating high-quality reference genomes for important crops, including sweetpotato and cucurbit crops, which have been used to accelerate the process of breeding and is also interested in investigating genomes to improve our understanding of the evolution and domestication of crop species.