2024 Industry Award Sponsored by Phenospex

Dr. Eric Schultz

Research Scientist
Corteva Agriscience
Profile

Eric earned his B.S. in Biology from Ohio Northern University and his Ph.D. in Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Florida.  Prior to Corteva, Eric worked as a postdoc at UF, continuing his work in microgravity research, and at Washington University in St. Louis, working on the role of mechanosensitive ion channels in gravitropic responses.  His doctoral work at UF focused on root morphometrics in response to microgravity and the interaction between gravitropism and thigmotropism, relying on statistical analysis in R.  He started his career with Corteva in 2017 as a Research Scientist in the Spectroscopy group, focusing on hyperspectral plant phenotyping, experimental design, and statistical analysis, becoming a people leader shortly thereafter.  Now, Eric leads a team of eight scientists and engineers, focused on early stage phenome-level data collection, integration, and analysis.  The team’s main focus is aiding in decision-making using a data-informed approach and eliminating subjectivity, leading to selecting the best material to move forward in the pipeline, faster, and with more confidence.  Wherever possible, the team uses automation through processing and interpreting plant phenotypic data using R, machine learning, and classical statistics and encourages others to do the same.  Eric strongly believes in automation as the future of agriculture, freeing up people to do more creative science and innovation and compounding our collective ingenuity and realizing impossible dreams.

In his free time, Eric enjoys playing trombone, 3d printing, and picking up heavy things just to them back down.

2023 Industry Award Sponsored by Phenospex

Brice Floyd

Research Scientist, Field Sensing Technologies
Corteva Agriscience
Profile

Brice has been a Researcher at Corteva Agriscience since Mid-2015. His work has been focused on developing, validating, and deploying technologies within the Corteva organization. This focused work has enabled greater data quality, throughput, prediction, and novelty in the phenotypes collected across multiple crops and global geographies.

The use of phenotyping technologies within Corteva has funneled into finding the best seed or crop protection product to be sold to our grower customers. Not only are these techniques resulting in lower operations cost, but they are enabling new phenotypes to be detected that previously were overlooked.

Brice has been an important team member and thought-leader in what technologies to evaluate, building collaborative networks with stakeholders, end users, and vendors to build experiments to validate technology, and working to deploy technology into the way people complete their work. Because of this, phenotyping technologies of various types are actively deployed and used, in some cases in the place of human data collection, within Corteva. How these tools can be used in a larger grower context is also an interest of Brice.

2022 Industry Award Sponsored by Phenospex

Alencar Xavier

Quantitative Geneticist, Corteva Agrosciences
Adjunct Professor, Purdue University
[google scholar]

Alencar got his PhD at Purdue University in Soybean Breeding and Statistical Genetics. Alencar works at Corteva Agrisciences since 2016 as a quantitative geneticist, and since 2017 he is an adjunct professor at Purdue University. His research focus on computational quantitative genetics (mixed models, Bayesian methods and machine learning) and on integrating GxE, genomics, environmental information in plant breeding.