The University of Missouri Board of Curators recently named nine University of Missouri faculty members Curators’ Distinguished Professors and one Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus, including three CAFNR faculty members. The professorship is the highest and most prestigious academic rank the Board of Curators awards. It is awarded to a select few outstanding scholars with established reputations. This year’s CAFNR recipients of the title of Curators’ Distinguished Professor are:

• Mengshi Lin, Division of Food, Nutrition and Exercise Science. Lin’s research works to establish rapid, novel and non-invasive instrumental methods for the characterization of safety and quality attributes of agricultural and food products. His expertise is in food safety and nanotechnology.
• Bing Yang, Division of Plant Science and Technology and a primary investigator at Bond Life Sciences Center. The main research foci of the Yang laboratory are: gaining a molecular understanding of host disease susceptibility and resistance to pathogenic microbes by using bacterial blight of rice as a disease model; and developing and applying genome editing technologies for gene/trait discovery and for engineering improved traits such as disease resistance in crop plants.
• Xiaoqin Zou, Department of Physics & Astronomy in the College of Arts and Science with a joint appointment in CAFNR’s Division of Biochemistry. Zou’s research focuses on protein-ligand interactions, protein-protein interactions, computer-aided drug design and modeling of quantitative structure-function relationships of membrane proteins.