Highlights
Welcome New Students
Top Row – MS students
- Jessie Adams – Brown
- Amelia Boettcher - McGregor
- Angel Brooks – Missaoui
- Anne Marie Gahagan - Conner
- Caitlin McCann – Chavez
- Aasish Pokharel - Brown
- Skye Remko - Parrott
Second Row – PhD students
- Millicent Avosa –Bertioli
- Rachel Hill - Chee
- Dallas Kreisa – Li
- Emily Powell – Li
- Katie Toomey - Parrott
For biographical and other information, please check out our Graduate Student page.
2023 Retreat
Our annual retreats have become an indispensable way to maintain our identity across our three campuses, build new relationships, brainstorm research ideas, welcome invited speakers to the IPBGG, and give our graduate students experience in event planning and in presenting their research.
Our 2023 Annual Retreat – hosted by the IPBGG members of the Griffin Campus – brought us to Uptown Columbus, GA. With almost 100 participants, the retreat was held at the Historic Iron Works in the Columbus Convention and Trade Center, right on the banks of the Chattahoochee River!
The two-night program included a mix of speakers from public and private sectors covering a diversity of research areas including turfgrass breeding (Susana Milla-Lewis, NC State University), grape breeding (Bruce Reisch, Cornell University), ornamental breeding (Laura Masor, WinGen LLC) and apple rootstock breeding (Gennaro Fazio, USDA-ARS). UGA was well represented with Juliet (Ye) Chu (blueberry breeding - new faculty spotlight), our 2023 John Ingle Innovation in Plant Breeding Awardees Gaurab Bhattarai (pecan breeding, Conner Lab), Kendall Lee (forage genetics, Missaoui Lab) and Habib Widyawan (soybean breeding, Li Lab), IPBGG Postdocs Leynar Leyton Naranjo (Carol Robacker Lab) and Xunliang Liu (Melissa Mitchum Lab), and David Jespersen (Crop and Soil Sciences). The planetarium at the Coca-Cola Space Science Center was the setting for the keynote, where Geoff Graham (Corteva, Vice President Plant Breeding) delivered a stimulating talk about the application of new technologies and breeding improvement. Corteva also hosted a graduate student and postdoc workshop lead by Jeff Thompson (Corteva Soybean Lead).
The retreat also included a variety of team-building activities. The first day we went bowling and played at the arcade, followed by a social at Houlihan’s. Later in the afternoon of the second day, we enjoyed the Chattahoochee River tubing or kayaking, while others biked or walked the River Walk. The evening started with a private reception at the Coca-Cola Space Science Center, which features the most extensive collection of space shuttle artifacts in the state of Georgia. The evening ended with two planetarium shows, and a social at Houlihan’s.
Thank you to everyone that participated in the 2023 retreat. We cannot wait to see you all at our 2024 retreat!
- Leynar Layton
Retreat Photos
Click to enlarge.
Boerma Symposium
The 2023 lecture was presented by Dr. Alison Bentley, 2023 Borlaug CAST Communication Award recipient, current Bayer Visiting Scholar at the University of Minnesota and former Global Wheat Program director at CIMMYT.
The Boerma Plant Breeding for Excellence lecture series is held in honor of Dr. Roger Boerma and his contributions to the Institute of Plant Breeding, Genetics, and Genomics at the University of Georgia. This event is organized by IPBGG graduate students and post-docs and provides a unique leadership opportunity for them. The lecture has been held in the fall semester historically but is moving to the spring semester in 2025. To facilitate this transition, the lecture is slated to take place in September 2024 and again in February 2025, and will be held annually in the spring semester in subsequent years.
- Holly Wright
Symposium Photos
Click to enlarge.
