Notable

Edward S. Buckler, an adjunct professor of plant breeding and genetics and a research geneticist with the U.S. Plant, Soil and Nutrition Laboratory of the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), both at Cornell, is the winner of ARS' highest honor for a young scientist -- the Herbert L. Rothbart Outstanding Early Career Research Scientist Award. Buckler was recognized for pioneering genetic approaches that allow researchers to identify individual genes controlling complex agronomic traits. The work is expected to greatly facilitate and promote crop improvement and design. Before joining the ARS and Cornell staff in 2003, Buckler worked at ARS' Plant Science Research Unit and as an assistant professor of genetics at North Carolina State University, both in Raleigh, N.C., from 1998 to 2003. He has spent the last five years developing and adapting strategies for fine-mapping complex traits in plants to within a single gene, vastly improving gene-research resolution. These new strategies -- which previously had virtually no application in plant genetics -- make it possible to exploit the natural variation and diversity that have developed over the history of a crop species. Buckler received his bachelor's degree in biology and archeology (1992) at the University of Virginia and Ph.D. in biological sciences (1997) at the University of Missouri.