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Rod A. Wing

Professor, Plant Science
Director, Center for Desert Agriculture

Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering Division
Center membership : 
Center for Desert Agriculture, Red Sea Research Center


Affiliations

Education Profile

  • ​1980 B.A. Biochemistry, University of California, Berkeley
  • 1987 Ph.D. Genetics, University of California, Davis
  • 1987-1988 Postdoctoral Research Associate, Plant Gene Expression Center, U.C. Berkeley-USDA/ARS
  • 1988-1990 USDA/ARS Terry Kinney Postdoctoral Fellow, Plant Gene Expression Center, U.C. Berkeley-USDA/ARS
  • 1990-1991 Research Associate, Cornell University, NSF Plant Science Center, Ithaca, NY

Research Interests

Wing's pioneering work on the genome biology of rice and other crop plants has empowered the agricultural community across the globe to address both fundamental and applied research in pursuit of the 10 billion people question: How can we sustainably grow enough nutritious food to feed the world by 2050 without destroying our planet? Wing's approach to this question is to identify, understand, and harness the majority of natural variation that already exists in cultivated rice and its wild ancestors, and to use that information to create the next generation of green super crops. Since rice is the most important food crop on the planet, his team is developing new crop varieties that are higher yielding and more nutritious while having a smaller environmental footprint.

Selected Publications