Distinguished Career Award

 2024 Award Winner

Dr. David Ertl

Former Director of Production Technology at Iowa Corn Promotion Board
Profile

David received his B.S. in Agronomy from the University of Connecticut and M.S. and Ph.D. from Iowa State University in Plant Breeding. He worked at Pioneer Hi-Bred for 23 years as a corn breeder where he developed several commercial hybrids and as a Research Director, where he led the Performance Predictability Team. For the past 13 years, he has been working for Iowa Corn in research. At Iowa Corn, he was immediately asked by grower leaders to work on phenotyping, to leverage the newly sequenced corn genome. David was involved in the initiation of the Genomes To Fields Initiative, is serving on the Executive Board and has continued to support that work and has secured funding to help sustain that over the past 10 years. He was involved in the first NAPPN conference, held at Purdue in 2016 and again has supported that as it developed and secured funding. David was elected to the inaugural NAPPN board and served three years in that role, helping to provide structure and governance to this newly formed organization.

David has made multiple trips to Washington DC since 2015 securing federal funding for phenomics research, both through USDA-ARS for Genomes To Fields and USDA-NIFA for the Agricultural Genome To Phenome Initiative (AG2PI), which he assisted in getting into the 2018 Farm Bill and has subsequently lobbied for appropriations from Congress. He is currently serving on the Executive Board for AG2PI.

David is author or co-author on 30 journal articles, a book chapter and is an inventor on 15 U.S. patents. David retired from his career in agriculture June 2024.