Ron Mittler, Curators’ Distinguished Professor, Division of Plant Science and Technology, received CAFNR’s 2024 Mumford Award for Outstanding Faculty as part of the Celebration of Excellence Awards ceremony April 16.
Mittler is also part of the Bond Life Sciences Center, Interdisciplinary Plant Group and the School of Medicine’s Department of Surgery. He is well-known in the scientific community for his work on stress combinations in plants and reactive oxygen species (ROS) signaling, as well as for his discoveries of the “ROS wave” and “differential transpiration.”
He has been on the Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list for the past 10 years; since his recruitment to Mizzou in 2018 he has been cited over 38,000 times, published more than 80 papers and obtained more than $7 million in research funding. Mittler is highly sought as a speaker at international conferences, and was invited to contribute a review by the prestigious journal Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology. He was named Curators’ Distinguished Professor by the university in 2022.
“Ron’s contribution to the growth of knowledge and betterment of society in Missouri can be gauged from his participation in outreach activities for high school students and the public at Bradford Research Farm, by organizing and chairing two IPG symposia at Mizzou, and by introducing a new one-day workshop on Redox and ROS, open to the public, at Mizzou,” said nominator David Braun, Director of IPG, and professor, Division of Plant Science and Technology.
“Combatting plant stress will be one of the major challenges for humanity in the 21st century, and Ron is a visionary leader in this field,” said Richard A. Dixon, Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus, University of North Texas Department of Biological Sciences.