Dear Alumni and Friends,
Welcome to the Spring semester. I am delighted to share with you some of the remarkable achievements in 2025 from the Division of Plant Science and Technology (DPST). Our faculty and staff continue to provide learning and leadership opportunities for our students in classrooms, research laboratories, field, and international settings. Our mission is to keep students on track towards graduation, and to provide them with high quality education and the foundation for life-long career success. Recent investments into, for example, the Roy Blunt Soil Testing and Research Laboratory at MU’s Fisher Delta Research, Extension and Education Center in Portageville, MO, the new soybean cyst nematode lab and high-throughput phenotyping on the Columbia campus, will strengthen our research infrastructure and allow us to provide even stronger support for the farming community in the state. This investment was only possible through the support of MO legislatures, commodity groups and the USDA. These new investments will also allow our students to gain experience with advanced technologies and prepare our students for a broad range of future careers.
We continuously adapt our academic programs to optimally prepare our students for the careers of the future. We are currently undergoing a reimagining of our curriculum and continue to develop exciting new degree opportunities for our students. For example, we launched a new Landscape Design certificate and are well on the way to establishing additional certificate programs for our undergraduate students. These new programs will provide students with an opportunity to advance their degree and improve their career chances by showcasing their additional expertise to future employers. This future-oriented curriculum development will allow us to establish ambitious goals and to identify the major steps that will help us to achieve our mission: to train our students in emerging technologies and optimally prepare them for their future careers, to discover and disseminate new knowledge that will help us to address current and future challenges in the plant sciences, and to support farmers and the agricultural industry in Missouri through education, training, research, and community programs.
The Division continues to evolve. We are very excited to welcome nine new faculty members to our Division. With Michelle Brooks, we gained a new passionate and enthusiastic instructor with enormous greenhouse and integrated pest management experience. Emily Althoff, Carson Roberts, Alex Mangialardi, and Marcelo Barbosa will strengthen our expertise in urban entomology, forage agronomy, weed science, and digital and precision agriculture, and will allow us to improve our extension services for our stakeholders in the state. In addition, Erin Sparks, Jagdeep Singh, Joseph Lynch, Xiaoping Xin, and Erik Amezquita Morataya joined our Division, and will improve our teaching and research programs by their expertise in biomechanics, root architecture and function, metabolic engineering, and soil and data science. Currently ongoing is the recruitment of faculty members with expertise in rice and cotton agronomy, pollinator biology, and insect systematics.
Last year brought many other highlights for DPST. For example, the world-class researchers in the Division of Plant Science and Technology (DPST) continued to excel in cutting-edge research. The goal of the research and scholarly activity in the Division is to identify solutions to “real-life problems” that threaten the agronomic productivity in Missouri, the U.S., and the world. Our research programs are funded by federal (e.g. National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, US Department of Agriculture) and state funding agencies (e.g. Missouri Department of Agriculture, Missouri Department of Conservation), commodity groups and industry. Last year, we recorded an impressive $15.4 million in shared credit expenditures, a testament to our commitment to advancing knowledge and innovation, and Mizzou´s land-grant mission. Our research continues to advance in critical areas including digital agriculture, threats to agronomic plant productivity, plant breeding and engineering. We will continue to push the boundaries of new knowledge creation, and new technologies that improve plant and soil health, productivity, and sustainability. Our extension faculty share their expertise with farmers via field days, webinars, social media, and podcasts; reach billions of readers; and contribute more than $100 million per year to the state´s economy.
The excellence of our research programs is illustrated by new prestigious recognitions for our faculty: Henry Nguyen became a new Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, Ron Mittler and Felix Fritschi are newly elected Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, Bing Yang was named a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society, and Felix Fritschi was selected to serve as the new President of the Crop Science Society of America. Learning from these scientists in classrooms, or to get involved in their research programs can be a life-changing experience for undergraduate and graduate students. Faculty members of the Division were also the leading forces behind the launch of the Digital Agriculture Research and Extension Center (DAREC). DAREC brings together scientists, engineers, extension specialists, and students to develop emerging digital technologies and artificial intelligence solutions to transform conventional agriculture into highly efficient and sustainable systems.
I am a proud member of the Division of Plant Science and Technology, and I am looking forward to a successful conclusion of 2026.
Sincerely,
Heike Bücking