With Norman Borlaug as inspiration, Chandler Levinson’s mission is clear: reimagine plant breeding, one student at a time.
Chandler Levinson is showing that the future of plant breeding depends on mentorship grounded in field experience, not just academic training or corporate structure.
Levinson, a commercial pepper breeder at Bayer and the new chair of the National Association for Plant Breeding (NAPB) Borlaug Scholarship Committee, doesn’t just walk between rows of peppers and data spreadsheets — she walks between worlds. She’s helping usher in a new era where mentorship, not just machinery, defines the pace of innovation.
“We’re working on mechanical harvest in pepper,” she says. “But what’s exciting is that my design breeder, Natalie Kaiser, has mentored three students in the last three years through this work.”
At Bayer, innovation isn’t just a buzzword — it’s a unit. Entire teams are dedicated to breakthroughs, but Levinson’s lens is different. She sees mentorship as the fastest route to real impact. And that means not just training students to handle petabytes of breeding data — but to think, to listen, and, critically, to communicate.
“Your pipeline can live or die by data,” she says. “But data doesn’t build trust. Data can’t sit across from a farmer and ask what’s really keeping them up at night. I still visit every region every year to walk the plots and talk to farmers face-to-face.”
That tactile wisdom — of reading a plant, watching the soil, hearing a farmer’s hesitation in the wind — is the kind of knowledge you won’t find in a spreadsheet. And it’s what she’s trying to pass on to Borlaug Scholars, one conversation at a time.
Named after Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, the scholarship program is rooted in a legacy of gritty, grassroots-driven science. But Levinson’s view is that Borlaug’s greatest contribution wasn’t yield — it was capacity building. His origins as a wrestler at the University of Minnesota reveal the mindset that drove his greatest breakthroughs: discipline, resilience, and an unshakable willingness to grapple with complex problems — both literal and global.
“He didn’t just develop wheat. He built teams. He chose laborers from the field and trained them to be scientists. That’s international collaboration — not just us teaching others, but learning from them, too.”
Now, under Levinson’s leadership, the Borlaug Scholars Committee is expanding. In a landmark move, six students from Africa are being sponsored to attend the 2026 NAPB meeting in Texas — and to take what they’ve learned back to the African Plant Breeding Association. Plans are underway to scale that globally.
Still, the barriers aren’t just geographic — they’re cultural. Many young scientists believe that once they enter industry, they’re stuck. Levinson pushes back.
“Take the best, most exciting offer,” she says. “Whether it’s industry or academia. You can always pivot. What you learn in one space, you bring to another.”
If she could redesign the entire pipeline of education for young scientists, she wouldn’t add more technical skills. She’d double down on communication.
“The best classes I ever took were on giving a research seminar and explaining science to everyday people,” she says. “They were so hard I almost quit. But now I use those skills every single day — convincing a farmer to take a chance on a product, or influencing a cross-functional team to go all-in on a new idea.”
