People

           Corn disease research can be fun, just ask the following;

David Rhyne

Dave Rhyne is a USDA Biological Science Technician.  He has been a mainstay of the molecular marker lab at NC State for almost 20 years and now brings his molecular marker mastery to our group.   He is originally from Fayetteville, NC, and received a BS from NCSU.

Dave likes loud music and big gels.

Donna Stephens

Randy Wisser

Randy Wisser was a postdoc in our program. He is now an assistant professor at the University of Delaware , Dept of Plant and Soil Science. He completed his Ph.D. with Rebecca Nelson at Cornell. Using the available literature he conducted genomic syntheses of resistance loci in rice and maize, discovering that disease QTL in both species were non-randomly distributed, and identified specific candidate genes and gene families for quantitative resistance in rice. In our group and in collaboration with Jim Holland, Randy used recurrently selected maize populations improved for components of quantitative resistance to develop an approach for identifying and functionally characterizing selected QTL.

 From his work as a graduate student he developed a working hypothesis that some plant genes confer quantitative resistance to multiple diseases. While with us and now at Delaware, he is examining this hypothesis.

 

E-mail: david_rhyne@ncsu.edu

E-mail: rjw@udel.edu

Peter Balint-Kurti

Peter is a Research Geneticist with USDA-ARS, Plant Science Research Unit, at NC State University.    He has a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology/Genetics from the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK and has worked on slime moulds and pigs as well as on plants (his first love).   Before joining the ARS in June 2003, he worked in commercial biotechnology– engineering bananas for disease resistance (or at least trying to).  This is the longest he has ever managed to hold down a job.

E-mail: peter_balintkurti@ncsu.edu

Peter Balint-Kurti

USDA-ARS

Dept. of Plant Pathology,

NC State University

Raleigh NC 27695-7616

Phone: 919-515-3516

Lab: 919 515 7376

Fax:919-856-4816

E-mail: peter_balintkurti@ncsu.edu

To contact us:

Bob Baesman

           Bob Baesman was our technician and resident SSR maven He has now retired to Panama.  We miss him.

PAST MEMBERS

The Inoculators!

George was yet another person we shared with Jim.  He is now having a much better time working with Paul Murphy.

George Van Esbroek

E-mail: gvanes@mindspring.com

Kristen Kump

Kristen started Fall 2007 as a masters student funded on the Oscar Smith  Pioneer fellowship .  She comes to us from Chicago via Wisconsin.   She really likes plant disease, which means we get a half share of her. She’s working on fine –mapping of disease QTL both using the NAM population and the ancient technique of linkage analysis

E-mail: klkump@ncsu.edu

Araby Belcher

Araby has just completed her masters degree with us.    Her project concerns the phenotypic, molecular and physiological characterization of near-isogenic lines  differing for disease resistance.  Araby comes from Wisconsin too, where she was a high school wrestling champion.

E-mail: arbelcher@gmail.com

John Zwonitzer

John Zwonitzer was a graduate student at NC State and completed his PhD with us, working on the dissection of some of our favorite quantitative trait loci.    He grew up a Kansas farm boy and has an MS. from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Crop and Environmental Sciences.   He  was a Senior research assistant at the Noble foundation for six years prior to joining us.   

           John is now happily breeding corn with Dow AgroSciences in Huxley Iowa.

E-mail: JCZwonitzer@dow.com

Jose Santa-Cruz

Jose comes to us from Lima, Peru.  Originally a potato guy, he worked at CIP before completing a Masters at Penn State on recurrent selection in spuds for early blight resistance .  He is working on fine-mapping and characterization of disease resistance QTL and is funded on a Monsanto fellowship.

E-mail: jhsantac@ncsu.edu

2006

2007

2008

USDA-ARS Maize Disease Resistance Genetics at NC State

Donna Stephens was a wonderful field technician who was with us for  more than four years.  We lost her in early 2009 to pancreatic cancer.  She is sorely missed for her dedication and good humour.

Rahul Dhawan

Rahul worked as a post-doc on our NSF-funded project looking at  the genetic architecture controlling the Hypersensitive response in maize.  He was here all too briefly and was recently hired away by Monsanto, where he works on creation of double haploids among other things.

E-mail: rahul.dhawan@monsanto.com

2009

Pat Fredrichs

Pat has been rating corn for us in Andrews, NC, for the past 4 years.  He’s a great find, you would never know tha tthis is his first job in plant genetics.

Adisu Negri

Adisu joined us in Nov 2009 to work as a post-doc on our NSF-funded project looking at  the genetic architecture controlling the Hypersensitive response in maize. He cones to us from a PhD with Rich Horsley in Barley breeding and quantitative genetics

E-mail: adisu.negeri@ndsu.edu

Abbey Sutton

Abbey has been working with us for the past year as a research specialist, helping manage our field program.  She is qualified both as a plant pathologist and as a vet, so she should be able to cure most of the things she comes across.