The Mid America CropLife Association (MACA) honored an academic leader recently at its annual meeting held in St. Louis.
The MACA Educator of the Year Award was presented to Dr. Todd Gaines, Colorado State University. The award recognizes an individual who has demonstrated significant contributions to American agriculture, especially in the MACA region. Also, the person has demonstrated evidence of consistency in educating the public on the value of production agriculture.
Dr. Todd Gaines is from the Agricultural Biology department at Colorado State University where he has emerged as a top global educator in agriculture with a program focus on crop weeds and the underlying molecular and biochemical mechanisms of herbicide resistance to common herbicides such as Roundup, Atrazine, Glean, and many others.
His state, national, and global recognition is based on his expert knowledge of molecular target site resistance and non-target site resistance (where, as a PhD student he made the first ever global discovery of EPSPS gene amplification as the basis of glyphosate resistance in Palmer amaranth which was published in PNAS).
He has been instrumental in a weed science educational short course targeted to weed management personnel working for major agrichemical companies.
Dr. Gaines is the director of a novel new major in Pest Management in his home department. He is sought after to contribute guest lectures and relevant research updates. In 2017 Dr. Gaines spearheaded the 2nd International Global Herbicide Resistance challenge held in Denver, Colo., attended by more than 370 people from around the world.
While Dr. Gaines focuses on research and education, he has trained and educated PhD graduate students from six countries.
Dr. Gaines obtained his PhD in weed science at Colorado State University, which was followed by five years of Post Doc research with Dr. Steve Powles in Australia, including two years of molecular research at Bayer Crop Science in Germany.
Categories: Missouri, Education