Who We Are
Numerous faculty and staff from seven academic units contribute to the CTC. Faculty are located at the UF/IFAS main campus and the Citrus Research and Education Center (C-REC), Lake Alfred, FL. The initial working group consists of the following faculty:
Leadership
- Charlie Messina, Crop Transformation Center Director and Professor
- Eric Triplett, Founder, Crop Transformation Center, Professor & Department Chair
Disease Resistance
- Rosemary Loria, Lead, Plant Pathology
- Zhonglin Mou Citrus greening product development
- Jose Huguet Tapia, Predictive plant pathology and informatics
- Nian Wang, Citrus greening product development
Phenomics
- Diego Jarquin, Lead Multi-OMICS Genetic Prediction & AI
- Esteban Rios, Plant Breeder Workgroup Chair
- Charlie Li, Robotics, automation & AI
- Kevin Wang, Field phenomics & AI
Trait biology
- Kelly Balmant, Lead, Bioinformatics and Transformation
- Fredy Altpeter, Transformation consultant
- Kevin Begcy, Gene-editing monocots
- Alfred Huo, Gene-editing dicots
- Jeongim Kim, Plant secondary metabolism
Breeding
- Marcio Resende, Lead and Chair, UF/IFAS Plant Breeders Working Group
- Vance Whitaker, Strawberry breeding & genetics
Human Dimensions
- Kay Kelsey, Lead, Human Dimensions and Program Evaluation
- Lisa House, Consumer economics, market research
- Bachir Kassas, Consumer behavior and preferences
External Advisory Board
- Renee Lafitte, Director, Crops Research and Development, Gates Foundation
- Brian Doyle, Managing Director, Accenture
- John Arbuckle, Corteva
- Eugenia Saini, Executive Secretary, Regional Fund for Agricultural Technology (FONTAGRO)
- Matt Joyner, CEO, Florida Citrus Mutual
Interested in joining our team?
We are hiring Ph.D. students and post-doctoral associates to join our team: