Dr. Addie Thompson is an Associate Professor at Michigan State University in the Department of Plant, Soil & Microbial Sciences and a member of the Plant Resilience Institute. With a focus on genetics and phenomics, Dr. Thompson’s research addresses critical agricultural challenges in maize and sorghum, including nitrogen response, disease resistance, and predictive modeling for precision agriculture and plant breeding. She obtained her BS in Genetics from Iowa State University, a PhD in Applied Plant Sciences - Plant Breeding and Molecular Genetics from the University of Minnesota, and conducted postdoctoral research at Purdue University in field-based phenomics and quantitative genetics. At MSU, Dr. Thompson has led a successful plant phenomics initiative, fostering collaboration between plant scientists, breeders, and computational experts. She teaches graduate plant breeding, as well as courses at the intersection of computational and plant sciences that connect with industry and stakeholders to prepare students for a rapidly evolving field.

Justin Lombardoni is the ornamental plant breeder at the Chicago Botanic Garden. His program focuses on introducing herbaceous perennial cultivars, primarily through interspecific hybridization. He also works closely with the Garden’s plant evaluation program, utilizing its expertise and germplasm to further breeding efforts.

James (Jack) Satterlee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Botany at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research investigates how plant form evolves and how gene regulatory networks are rewired to generate novel morphological traits. Using a combination of developmental genetics, comparative genomics, and evolutionary approaches, his lab seeks to uncover the molecular mechanisms that underlie plant morphological innovation.

Jack completed his Ph.D. in Plant Biology at Cornell University in Mike Scanlon’s lab, where he studied shoot patterning and stem cell organization using single-cell transcriptomic approaches. He was then an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the lab of Zachary Lippman, expanding his work into evolutionary genomics and trait diversification in Solanum. Jack began his lab at UW-Madison in Spring 2025. A major goal of the lab is better to understand how conserved genetic pathways are repeatedly co-opted to repeatedly give rise to adaptive and agriculturally useful phenotypic diversity across plant species.

Alencar got his PhD at Purdue University in Soybean Breeding and Statistical Genetics. He started working at Corteva Agrisciences in 2016 as quantitative geneticist and since 2022 leads the breeding analytics in Latin America and Africa. Alencar is also an adjunct professor at Purdue University since 2017. His research focuses on breeding pipeline optimization and computational quantitative genetics.