Bing Yang, Curators’ Distinguished Professor in the Division of Plant Science and Technology, received CAFNR’s 2025 Mumford Award for Outstanding Faculty as part of the Celebration of Excellence Awards ceremony April 17.
Yang is a world-renowned leader in crop genome engineering and plant pathology, a principal investigator at both the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and the Bond Life Sciences Center, and the director of Mizzou’s Plant Transformation Facility.
“He is developing transformative new tools and approaches that are revolutionizing agriculture,” said David Braun, nominator and director of the Interdisciplinary Plant Group. “This work is having real-world impact and will transform small holder farmers’ lives!”
Yang’s seminal discoveries protect plant health in challenging environments, nominators say. He has identified a rice disease resistance gene to protect plants from a devastating bacterial pathogen, transforming understanding of how plants transport sugar. Additional collaborative research defined how the pathogen usurped a plant sugar transporter. In addition, Yang pioneered the use of TALENs and CRISPR/Cas9 in plants, using his genome engineering skills to modify the promoters of sugar transporters to be unresponsive to the bacterial pathogen’s proteins.
He has been named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher every year since 2019; brought more than $8 million in grants to his lab since joining Mizzou in 2018; publishes in top-tier journals; is regularly invited to present at prominent scientific conferences; holds five patents/patent applications; mentors a large group of doctoral students, postdocs and senior scientists; and is an editor at journals including Molecular Genetics and Genomics, where he serves as Editor-in-Chief. Yang is a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Phytopathological Society, and has received research awards from CAFNR and Iowa State University.
“In a rapidly changing world, the need for rapid modification of crop plants is more important than what has occurred through the millennia,” said James Birchler, Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at Mizzou. “Dr. Yang has helped set the stage for these advances.”