Rice

Alex Mangialardi

May 28, 2025

Alex Mangialardi

Educational background Ph.D., Agronomy-Weed Science, Mississippi State University…

Hong An smiling.

Nov. 21, 2023

Hong An

Educational background Ph.D., Plant Genetics and Breeding, Huazhong Agricultural University…

Portrait of Chase Floyd

Jan. 12, 2023

Chase Floyd

Chase Floyd joined MU Extension in 2023 as an assistant research professor and state extension specialist for crop protection. In this position, he targets both entomological and pathological research and develop thresholds to maximize producer yield retention and incorporate new technology and methods to aid Missouri producers in controlling pests and retaining yield. His dissertation focused on creating a management regime for the rice billbug, which has recently earned major pest status. His time in Arkansas was spent obtaining as much biological and ecological information as possible on the previously unresearched pest. He developed techniques for controlling the rice billbug,…

Tian Peng posing.

Oct. 13, 2022

Peng Tian

Tian has an extension appointment in plant disease diagnosis. His responsibilities include management of Plant Diagnostic Clinic at University of Missouri and participation in Missouri Integrated Pest Management program and National Plant Diagnostic Network. His extension program provides identification services of plant disease, weed and insect as well as disease management recommendations to growers, agricultural professionals, agribusinesses, and the various commodity groups in the state. His research program focuses on identification of new plant diseases and development of innovative assays to characterize and differentiate viral and fungal pathogens in specialty crops to address current plant health problems and ensure the…

Bing Yang smiling.

Aug. 21, 2018

Bing Yang

Bing’s group has used rice as a workhorse to develop genome editing technologies and demonstrate their promising potential as biotech tools for basic and applied research in rice and other crop plants. With the increasingly available sequences of many plant genomes, technologies for genome editing have become the most promising and popular tools for scientists to understand such complex genomes and precisely and quickly manipulate them for good. Genome editing technologies allow precise, targeted genomic changes. TALENs and CRISPR/Cas represent the state-of-the-art genome editing technologies and hold immense promise for defining the genetic and molecular basis for valuable traits, as…

Pat Westhoff

Feb. 26, 2018

Patrick Westhoff

Westhoff is the director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) and a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Missouri. He grew up on a small dairy and hog farm in northeast Iowa. After getting his undergraduate degree in political science from the University of Iowa, he served as Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala.   He has a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas and a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Iowa State University. From 1992-1996, he was an economist with the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, where…