New Faculty and Faculty Recognitions

Andrew Ogden

Andrew joined the Controlled Environment Agriculture team in 2023 as a plant breeder after serving as a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems at the University of New Hampshire. Prior to working as a lecturer and finishing his PhD, he completed his MS in Horticulture at UGA and worked extensively on farms in both North Carolina and Costa Rica.

His  goal at UGA is to develop cultivars of specialty crops suitable for production in controlled environments like greenhouses, high tunnels, and indoor vertical farming operations. To get started, he is following up on previous work in Cucurbit breeding in crops like melon and summer squash while pursuing other crops based on industry interest and demand. Andrew also has an Extension appointment through which he seeks to assist the CEA industry here in Georgia and beyond.

Amol Nankar

Before joining UGA, Amol served since July 2018 as a Research Scientist in the EU-funded PlantaSYST project to establish a center of excellence in Plant Systems Biology and Biotechnology in Bulgaria. Prior to this, Amol also served as a postdoc at Texas A&M AgriLife in Lubbock from 2016-2018 and completed his Ph.D. at New Mexico State University in 2015.

Here at UGA Amol’s vegetable breeding program will focus on breeding vegetable crops (sweet pepper, onion, tomato, and snapbean) for stress adaptation (biotic and abiotic), fruit quality, and horticultural traits that are relevant for Georgia and southeast US. His areas of vegetable breeding interests include pre-breeding, trait introgression, marker assisted selection, high-throughput phenotyping, and application of integrated omics for cultivar development. Beside research, his extension role is aimed to work with different vegetable value chain stakeholders and serve the vegetable industry by disseminating relevant breeding information and other educational information that could assist in increased sustainability and profitability.

Dr. Nankar's ResearchGate Profile  |  Dr. Nankar's Google Scholar Profile

Caleb Warrington

Caleb joined as an affiliate member of the Institute of Plant Breeding, Genetics, and Genomics. He received his M.S. degree in Entomology at UGA in 2006 and a Ph.D. from IPBGG in 2011.

Caleb spent 10 years in private industry following graduate school as both a soybean and sesame breeder. His work included the development of conventional soybean varieties with improved nutritional qualities and initiating large scale varietal testing in Texas and Oklahoma for non-shattering sesame.

Currently, Caleb is the Senior Director of Operations at Georgia Seed Development in Athens. Georgia Seed Development functions as a bridge between plant breeders and commercial companies by producing genetically pure foundation seed and other plant material. He manages operations in Athens, which is predominately soybean, wheat, and turfgrass and the GSD foundation peanut shelling facility in Plains, GA.

Carol Robacker

Carol Robacker retired at the end of 2023. She joined the University of Georgia in 1986, and she was one of the founding members of the IPBGG, serving for several years on its steering committee.

Carol’s research area was breeding and genetics of landscape plants, with two main research areas:

• to breed landscape plants adapted to the heat and drought stress of urban conditions
• to develop cultivars of native plants

Her abelia cultivars have become a fixture in many urban areas in Georgia and serve as a reminder of Carol’s dedication to the urban landscape.  Carol will return part-time to finish her breeding work on cultivars still coming out of her breeding pipeline.

Soraya Bertioli

Soraya Bertioli received one of UGA's Non-Tenure Track Faculty Research Excellence Awards for 2024.

"This award recognizes exceptional research productivity and commitment to excellence by a non-tenure track faculty member. Recipients demonstrate an exceptional degree of research novelty and impact on their field of study in work done while at their UGA position."

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