Patrick Brown

Patrick Brown is an assistant professor in the Department of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois and an associate professor and nut crops breeder at the University of California, Davis. He will apply his expertise in sorghum genetics to measure the physical traits and genes for our project's sorghum plants. Using this data, he will perform mapping and prediction to help identify top-performing plants. In short, his team will genotype the sorghum accessions; plant, maintain, and harvest the sorghum plots; perform basic phenotype-genotype association and genomic prediction; calculate heritability for manually-collected and robotic phenotypes. He will oversee the field trials throughout the growing season that will be analyzed by the project’s robot. Patrick received his bachelor’s degree from Reed College and went on to earn his doctorate from Cornell University. He has authored many peer-reviewed publications, including the Crop Science Society of America’s 2011 Outstanding Paper on Plant Genetic Resources.