Brown

Susan K. Brown, Cornell professor of horticultural sciences at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station (NYSAES) in Geneva, N.Y., has been named the first Herman M. Cohn Professor of Horticultural Sciences. The endowment was made possible by the 1980 and 1992 sales of the parcels of a 300-acre fruit farm on Lake Ontario in Sodus, N.Y., bequeathed by Cohn to the university in 1966.

"Susan is an internationally recognized apple breeder and geneticist and a dedicated mentor to her graduate students," said Susan A. Henry, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell.

The professorship will help support Cornell's apple-breeding program, one of the world's largest. The program emphasizes genetic approaches to understanding and improving apples, including marker-assisted selection, apple fruit quality, nutrition, plant architecture and the role that genes play in tree architecture and development. Genetic modification of tree form, for example, would help the mechanical harvesting of apples, which is important because of increasing problems with adequate farm labor at harvest.

Thomas J. Burr, director of NYSAES, said Brown is most deserving of the endowed chair: "She is recognized as a world leader in apple breeding and genetics. Her research on apple tree architecture and related genetic markers has the potential to greatly impact the apple industry worldwide."