April 8, 2025
Noted plant geneticist to speak April 15 at K-State
MANHATTAN, Kan. – A scientist who has helped to build understanding between the interactions of genetics and environment in growing many Midwestern farm crops will be speaking at Kansas State University on April 15.
Jianming Yu’s talk highlights the 38th annual Elmer G. Heyne Crop Science Lecture, hosted by K-State’s Department of Agronomy. His talk is scheduled for 3:30 pm in room 1018 of the university’s Throckmorton Plant Sciences Center.
There is no cost to attend.
Yu is director of the Raymond F. Baker Center for Plant Breeding in the Department of Agronomy at Iowa State University. His research includes a series of studies on staple crops – sorghum, rice, maize, wheat and barley among them – to develop a framework for gene discovery and performance prediction in many production environments.
He notes that his presentation at K-State will focus on recent results, “and how we gradually improved our understanding of several fundamental concepts.”
“Dr. Yu is recognized as one of the top scientists in the world for quantitative genetics, which interconnects plant breeding, genomics, molecular genetics, and statistics,” said Mike Stamm, a K-State canola breeder and chair of the Elmer G. Heyne lecture committee.
Yu previously worked as an assistant professor in K-State’s Department of Agronomy from 2006 to 2012, and has been at Iowa State University since that time. He is also currently the Pioneer Distinguished Chair in Maize Breeding.
Elmer Heyne joined K-State’s Department of Agronomy in 1938, embarking on a career marked by numerous scientific achievements that improved wheat quality, resistance to disease and various plant breeding techniques. During his tenure, he released three corn lines, four sorghum lines, one barley variety, six oat varieties and ten wheat varieties.
“Dr. Heyne was a wheat breeding pioneer in his time,” Stamm said, “so this topic is fitting for a lecture that commemorates his many accomplishments.”
More information is available online from K-State’s Department of Agronomy.