Plant Breeding Coordinating Committee
Subcommittee - Education and Training of Plant Breeders
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This is the report from the subcommittee on a Education and Training of Plant Breeders. It met as part of the Plant Breeding Coordinating Committee in Des Moines, Iowa on June 16-18, 2008.
This report was prepared by: Todd Wehner and H. Thomas Stalker
- Officers
- Thomas Stalker, Past chair (Tom_stalker@ncsu.edu)
- David Knauft, Chair (dknauft@uga.edu) - had to step down early
- Rita Mumm, Vice chair (ritamumm@uiuc.edu) - became chair
- Mitch Tuinstra, Secretary (drmitch@purdue.edu) - became vice chair
- Position of secretary currently open
- White paper
- White paper is completed and comments should be sent to H. T. Stalker by July 15
- A 1-pager is in progress
- A plant breeding educational survey is being circulated to universities to obtain data for 1-pager
- Action items:
- Need data concerning company needs for plant breeders
- Need list of USDA plant breeders
- Subcommittee objectives:
- To assess the needs for plant breeding education and develop a plan that will assure a future workforce in public and private segments of the industry
- To develop strategies for attracting students into plant breeding
- To lead efforts for image building and outreach programs about plant breeding
- To assess the needs and develop a plan to obtain plant breeding educational materials such as videos, slides, textbooks, and information sheets
- Secure long-term funding at a national level for programs to assure continued education of plant breeding students
- Proper curriculum: courses and universities
- Outline of ideal curriculum (Fred Bliss, 2005); basic list: genetics, statistics, pathology, breeding, advanced breeding, breeding lab, resistance, molecular, quantitative, evolution
- Various textbooks are being used ( Aquaah, Fehr, Simmonds, Allard, Briggs and Knowles), each with ‘good’ chapters, but non serve the needs for an entire semester course
- Universities with few plant breeding faculty cannot cover all areas of discipline in the classroom
- Action items:
- Determine the need for plant breeding textbooks for undergraduate and graduate education
- Determine the need for distance education courses in plant breeding; identify courses needed most often; explore options to develop distance education courses
- University funding and programmatic support
- State funding has dropped since the 1980s
- Grant and other external money (gifts, memos) is a major source of funding for most plant breeding programs vs. support through experiment stations
- Plant breeding faculty hiring and support
- New NIFA funding may include plant breeding
- NIH, NSF, NRI: mostly basic biology research funding, but potential exists to acquire funding for curriculum building
- Department of Education is non-traditional source of funding for plant breeding education
- Endowment funding: fellowships ($1,000,000 gives $40,000/yr)
- Action item:
- Explore feasibility of establishing a national endowment for plant breeding education (possible board of directors from Monsanto, Syngenta, Pioneer, etc)
- 2009 workshop (Madison WI):
- Develop a plan: visit Washington DC
- Action item:
- Develop a program to present to commodity group leaders at next years meeting emphasizing needs for plant breeders, educated graduates, and funding for programmatic research support and education. to next year
- Outreach:
- Plant breeding outreach is poorly done in the U.S., with few videos and other information about the discipline
- Action item:
- Develop a Plant breeding website (independent of SCC080 and NCSU)
- Consider hiring of web editor as half-time position
- Gather animations, videos, PowerPoints from industry, universities
- Hire graphic artists, sociologists, marketing experts
- Shawn Kaeppler Univ. of Washington has a grant for plant breeding videos (YouTube); Univ. of Florida has initiated agricultural outreach programs
- Mentoring/Internships:
- Summer internships with universities, seed companies serves as a mechanism to attract students into plant breeding
- Reach K-12 students ( e.g., YouTube, MySpace- WheatCAP:grant funding for outreach, PowerPoint, animations)
- Undergraduate plant breeding courses or labs (sophomore, junior, senior level) are needed at universities
- Plant breeding needs to be presented as an alternative to business, law, medicine
- Participating attendees in this workgroup:
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