Thank you for attending the 2018 RTWG Conference!

Ken Cassman is currently Emeritus Professor of Agronomy, University of Nebraska, and agricultural consultant. Over a 40-yr career, Ken’s research has focused on ensuring local and global food security while conserving natural resources and protecting the environment. He has worked on many of the world’s major cropping systems—from rice-based systems in the tropics of Asia and South America, to maize-soybean systems in the US, Brazil, and Argentina, and high-value irrigated crops in California and Egypt. He currently works at the intersection of agriculture and environmental advocacy to improve yields, profit, and environmental performance. He led development of the Global Yield Gap Atlas (www.yieldgap.org), an interactive map-based web platform developed to estimate exploitable gaps in yield and water productivity for major food crops worldwide. He is co-author of Crop Ecology, a seminal upper-division/graduate school textbook. In 2017, Cassman received the Bertebos Prize from the Swedish Royal Academy of Agriculture and Forestry in recognition of his contributions to agricultural science.

John M. Eadie, Ph.D. is a professor in of the Department of Wildlife, Fish & Conservation Biology at the University of California, Davis.  He currently holds the Dennis G. Raveling Chair in Waterfowl Biology.  He received his B.Sc. from the University of Western Ontario, M.S. from Queen’s University and Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia.  He was an associate professor of zoology at the University of Toronto from 1989-1996 prior to his current position at UC Davis.  His research interests include the ecology and management of waterfowl and wetlands. He and his students have studied mallards, wood ducks, Barrow’s and common goldeneye, Steller’s eider, Canada geese, trumpeter swans, Orinoco geese and black-headed ducks at study sites ranging from Alaska to Argentina.  His current research focuses on evaluating food production for waterfowl in agricultural and managed wetland habitats, determining the factors influencing population size and production of mallards and wood ducks in California, and linking population and ecological concepts to wildlife management and conservation.

Susan McCouch is a Professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Plant Biology, Biological Statistics and Computational Biology at Cornell University. She received her PhD from Cornell in 1990 and spent 5 years with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines before joining the Cornell faculty in 1995. Her research focuses on rice and includes publication of the first molecular map of the rice genome in 1988, early QTL studies on disease resistance, drought tolerance, maturity and yield, cloning of genes underlying domestication traits, and demonstrating that low-yielding wild and exotic Oryza species harbor genes that can enhance the performance of modern, high-yielding cultivars. Recently, she has used genome wide association studies (GWAS) to demonstrate that the different subpopulations of O. sativa have significantly different genetic architecture underlying complex trait variation, providing new insights into the genetic basis of transgressive variation, and supporting an ancient divergence between cultivated groups. She has trained scores of young scientists throughout the world, was recently elected a fellow of the AAAS and has received numerous research, teaching and faculty awards.