What initially inspired you to pursue a career in teaching plant breeding?
“I first became inspired when I met Dr. Norman Borlaug, the man who fed the world and the greatest plant breeder ever living, when I was a Plant Breeding student in 2003. That’s when I first realized the potential of plant breeders to feed the world. That same year, I saw an article in nature with the title that read “Plant Breeders are a dying breed” - Digging deeper I realized that they said so because plant breeders trained in traditional plant breeding were not adequately conversing with those trained in biotechnology to realize how these technologies and tools could improve the efficiency of the breeding process. So, when one of my mentors, Prof. Karim Maredia, asked me in 2004 “Where do you see yourself 25 years from now?” I said ‘I want to train plant breeders.’ And now 20 years later I still have the same goal. My vision is to train the next generation of plant breeders as ‘hunger-fighters.’ We are expected to feed a projected 10 billion people in 2050, meaning we have to double the current food production with fewer resources and in a changing climate. I see my role as training plant breeders on how new tools and technologies can improve the efficiency of traditional breeding methods, enabling them to hit the ground running and contribute to feeding and nourishing a growing population. When I saw Mahatma Ghandi’s quote, “be the change you wish to see in the world” I realized I wanted to be that change I wish to see - to make ‘plant breeders a thriving breed!’ If I want to see that change, I have to be that change. After traveling the world piloting face to face and online teaching, doing collaborative research across borders with undergraduate and graduate plant breeding students and professionals, I decided that all of those pilots can come together with the online Master’s program that I have now launched to reach a broader audience beyond the borders of MSU, Michigan and the United States.”
Could you elaborate on the program you're currently developing?
A lot of the plant breeding efforts have been focusing on a few major food security crops we use today to feed the world. In my travels to over 25 countries, I realized that in a number of countries they only had a handful of plant breeders to improve nationally important crops. Some breeders were working to breed more than 2-3 crops, and many of those plant breeders did not have the knowledge or access to new and emerging plant breeding tools and technologies to improve the efficiency of the breeding process. And so, plant breeders sure looked like a dying breed in many of the countries I visited. So I tried to fix the void by teaching plant breeding at MSU; training graduate students, offering short courses at MSU and other countries, doing collaborative research and piloting a sandwich degree program etc., to train breeders. But even with all of that, I could only reach out to a limited number compared to what I wanted to do, and it was not cheap.
Then the pandemic happened and I couldn’t travel anymore. So, through training programs offered at MSU, I learned how to teach online and that was a game changer! First, I offered online courses at MSU, then I developed an online professional certificate course called “Plant Breeding 2 Fight Hunger” and when some of the participants of the course asked if MSU had online degree programs in plant breeding and the answer was a “no”, I decided that developing an online masters degree program from MSU could offer plant breeding education to a much much larger audience. The way I am developing this online program is for plant breeding students globally to have the courses offered from MSU at their fingertips (improve accessibility), so they can take the courses at their own pace without leaving their countries or employment (improve flexibility) and offer this program at instate tuition rates (improve affordability). Plus, the hands-on experience they need they can obtain by working on nationally important local crops and traits and working in local plant breeding programs - so not all of us have to reinvent the wheel, and can share the burden. This way, the limited resources can be focused on crops that are important to local farmers to feed and nourish people in their countries. I saw that as the change I wanted to be, to make plant plant breeders a thriving breed at a global scale!
I would host interviews with both classical plant breeders and ones using new bio-technology. One of my students who was a plant breeder from Zambia wrote in the last discussion post on D2L:
‘As I was doing this course, I started wondering how many courses I actually missed when I was a student’, and I thought ‘where is this going?’. Then I read on to where she said, ‘But I realized all these technologies came after I graduated so I never really learned about it’. She later asked me if I had any plant breeding graduate programs that I was offering at MSU, and I responded no… but that gave me the idea, maybe I should do one! So that’s what led into what I’m doing now. I'm about to launch a Master’s degree program called “Global Plant Breeding”.
What strategies do you use to teach plant breeding online, given the field’s emphasis on hands-on learning?
“My first strategy is to take plant breeding knowledge from MSU beyond its borders using a user-friendly learning management system like D2L we have at MSU. Because the MSU IT team has developed excellent templates to help develop lessons, to incorporate HTML lesson plans, recorded lectures and other media components into D2L that gets resized for students to even use a smart phone to view and learn, it makes developing courses with consistent design so much easier. With Zoom technology, I have also been able to reach out to my collaborators and Plant breeding leaders to develop interviews so that online masters students get to hear plant breeding experiences from many countries and breeders who started their programs with few resources - which inspires others.
As for the hands-on component, it is a blessing to be at MSU because our knowledge network includes breeders and plant breeding institutions from CGIAR centers, National Agriculture Research systems (NARS), Universities, NGOs and private sector institutions around the world so that students will be able to conduct their research work with one of our collaborators unless of course they are already employed at a plant breeding institution. This way, we improve the human capacities in local institutions and they get to work with crops and traits that are important for that institution and countries. As such, I see this as a win-win for all - and an opportunity to train Plant Breeders without borders!”
Could you discuss the career opportunities and skill applications available to graduates of this program?
Because we are challenged with doubling the current food production by 2050, there will undoubtedly be a demand for skilled plant breeders; however, job opportunities will depend on each graduate’s level of expertise. It was different when I was a graduate student. Pretty much all of that lab work I did 20 years ago, can now be automated and outsourced! But now there are way more tools and technologies to improve plant breeding than 20 years ago, and way more data to analyze to make science-based informed decisions on which parents to cross and which progeny to select. So current students need to learn about available technologies to improve efficiency of breeding and what tool to use when - which is exciting on one hand but can also be daunting on the other because careful planning and decision-making becomes critical. Some students think that plant breeding is all about going to the field and getting your hands dirty. Well, it is totally different now - if you like to look at data and analyze it being in front of a computer all day, by all means, you can do that too! However, going forward, as a plant breeder you need to be able to communicate well with others, like plant biologists, entomologists, genomicists, agronomists, socio economists, AI engineers, and the list goes on. If you want an amazing job, you have to understand how other disciplines can help you, be a leader in your own field while being a good team player at the same time. You have to be able to focus on the big picture and ask yourself, what pieces of the jigsaw puzzle can you put together and what are the pieces that others can help you put together so that we get to solve wicked problems of the world - feeding and nourishing a growing population using fewer resources in a changing climate being just one of them.
Having said that, learning is an ongoing process as the field of plant breeding rapidly evolves, but it is important that students understand the Plant Breeding Process and how various tools and technologies allow them to improve breeding efficiency. With the online masters program, my goal is to provide that knowledge so that graduates can start their journey with a good foundation.