Senior Personnel

Randy Wisser
rjw@udel.edu
Associate Professor in Plant and Soil Sciences. Dr. Wisser earned his Ph.D. in Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell, followed by a postdoctoral stint at NCSU. His work encompasses crop genetic diversity and translational research for crop improvement, with focal areas of environmental adapation, disease resistance and response to selection.

tecle@udel.edu
Research Scientist. Tecle earned his M.S. at UD in Plant Science. He brings 20 years of experience in maize breeding to the group. Tecle is involved in research projects on the genetics of environmental adaptation, response to artificial selection, and disease resistance. He also helps with training activities including our summer plant genetics and breeding internship program for high school and undergraduate students.

Scott Davis
davissb@udel.edu
Research Associate. After a career in the commercial seed sector with DuPont Pioneer, Scott joined the lab under an initiative to expand infrastructure and develop educational resources for genome science at the University of Delaware. He collaborates with Ph.D. student Zhu Zhuo on this initiative and is our resident expert on Oxford Nanopore MinION sequencing.
Philip Saponaro
Postdoc. Working under the DR Maize project, Philip is co-mentored through a collaboration with Dr. Chandra Kambhamettu’s VIMS lab at UD. In collaboration with two Ph.D. students studying computer vision (Abhishek Kolagunda and Wayne Treible), he is advancing methods for segmentation and feature characterization of microscopy image data on plant-pathogen interactions.
Graduate Students

Heather Corn Manching
hcorn@udel.edu
Ph.D. student in Plant and Soil Sciences. That’s right folks, Corn is her maiden name. Heather works on the Maize ATLAS project. She has optimized GBS for genotyping heterozygous samples and is studying the genomic basis of response to selection of populations adapated in parallel across eight different environments.

ffrancis@udel.edu
Ph.D. student in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology. A member of the DR Maize team, Felix’s dissertation is focused on characterizing genetic diversity at quantitative resistance loci in maize. His research includes the development of new software such as ThermoAlign and associated bioinformatic pipelines for resequencing studies.

ningjing@udel.edu
Ph.D. student in Computer and Information Sciences (CIS adviser: Dr. L. Pollock). She is the newest member of the AccreteGB database and software development team. AccreteGB facilitates the activities required for a complete cycle of breeding, from organizing seed stocks for a planting through to harvesting and inventorying new stocks.

Abhishek Kolagunda
abhi@udel.edu
Ph.D. student in Computer and Information Sciences (CIS adviser: Dr. C. Kambhamettu). A member of the DR Maize team and student of Computer Vision, Abhishek is developing big data processing pipelines and segmentation and analysis methods for microscopy image data on plant-pathogen interactions.

John Dougherty
jjdoc@udel.edu
M.S. student in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology. A member of the Maize ATLAS team, John is developing a whole genome simulator to tackle fundamental questions about the genomic response to selection and for exploring new classes of experimental designs for genetic studies.

Jolie Wax
jwax@udel.edu
M.S. student in Plant and Soil Sciences. Jolie’s career interest is in teaching. She is developing the curriculum and course content for a new Genome Science major at UD.

Isaac Kamweru
ink@udel.edu
Borel Global Fellow M.S. student in Plant and Soil Sciences. Isaac is examining genetic diversity of breeding germplasm in Kenya’s national program (KALRO).

Susan Gachara
susanwg@udel.edu
Borel Global Fellow M.S. student in Plant and Soil Sciences. Focused on the current MLN pandemic on maize in Africa, Susan is adapting toehold switches for cost effective and field deployable viral diagnostics in plants.
Undergraduate Students

Julia Winkeler
jwink@udel.edu
Majoring in Plant and Soil Sciences and minoring in Computer and Information Sciences . Julia is working with GBS data to construct genetic maps and examine segregation patterns in maize populations.