b'concept or the software output is understood or if it wasScientist Award and spoke at the NAPBs virtual meeting analyzed correctly, she said. about how working with CIMMYT as a Ph.D student and In 2019, she travelled to Benin Republic, West Africa,coming to the United States allowed him to turn his pas-to teach statistical designs and data analysis at an in-per- sion for data science into a career. son workshop organized by the JRBiotek foundation forIn the kind of studies that we perform, every day 100 African researchers from 20 countries.there are new layers of information that were not there At the end of that workshop, 85 per cent of the par- before, he said.ticipants mentioned that the data analysis section was theWhen I had a chance to work with more layers of most impactful. This experience further strengthened myinformation, that was when I realized that in order to drive to organize more training workshops.make sense of all the different available omics of informa-To-date, these virtual and face-face workshops havetion, something different needed to be done, like devel-impacted thousands of early-career researchers. Evenoping new models and methods able to distinguish the though these workshops were initially designed anddifferent data types during analyses such that we can get tailored to Africans, they have also been beneficial tothe most of the information out of the data.researchers and students in Asia, South America, Europe,Jarquin has worked with plant breeders of different the U.S. and Australia, she says.crops in the U.S., Mexico, Japan, Australia, and from many The greatest impact is that African students are gain- other countries. He says the biggest lesson hes learned is ing confidence in analyzing and interpreting their data,that no matter the place on the earth, all the researchers and most importantly, they teach others in their variouswith whom I had the privilege of working with are inter-schools and communities. ested in developing products, methods and methodologies Discovering the field of data analysis and statistics wasto help humanity fight hunger. Their passion touched me what led Diego Jarquin to make a name for himself asand every single day Im motivated to do my best to help.one of the top statisticians in his field. Born in Oaxaca, Jarquin received a Ph.D. in statistics from the UniversityRadical Collabsof Postgraduate Education in Mexico in 2012. He hadAs researchers like Jarquin become increasingly able postdoctoral training at the University of Alabama- to collect new data, new collaborations are needed to Birmingham and at the University of NebraskaLincoln.ensure that data are effectively used and identify gaps He has been at Nebraska since 2017.that need closing.AWB-Germination-Nov2021-outline.pdf 1 2021-10-07 2:53:20 PMJarquin was awarded the 2020 NAPB Early CareerRadical collaborations were essential to advancing DNA sequencing technology, to where it now costs about $100 to re-sequence the human genome. This has resulted in a deluge of low-cost genomic data.In contrast, phenotyping is a 10,000-year-old chal-lenge that started with the visual assessment of plants for desirable attributes at the time of plant domestication. Phenomics technologies have only just begun to evolve more rapidly, and phenomics data are typically more expensive to collect on a large scale than their genomic counterparts.C This has caused a massive imbalance in the volume M of data collected, says Michael Gore, Liberty Hyde Bailey Y Professor and professor of molecular breeding and genetics at Cornell University. Gore spoke at the NAPB CM virtual meeting as part of a session on high-throughput MY phenotyping and the promise it holds for bolstering crop CY production.CMY Radical collaborations among plant biologists, engi-neers and computer scientists are needed to bring the lab K to the field, allowing multi-scale data to be collected, he says.Gores lab combines quantitative genetics, genomics, analytical chemistry, and remote sensing to elucidate the genetic basis of complex trait variation in crops. For comprehensive coverage of this years NAPB virtual meeting, including podcast interviews and award winner profiles, visit seedworld.com/napb-202150GERMINATION.CANOVEMBER 2021'