Susan McCouch

Cornell University, 162 Emerson Hall 162 Emerson Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-1901, United States of America

Susan McCouch is a Professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Plant Biology, Biological Statistics and Computational Biology at Cornell University. She received her PhD from Cornell in 1990 and spent 5 years with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines before joining the Cornell faculty in 1995. Her research focuses on natural variation in rice and includes publication of the first molecular map of the rice genome, QTL and genome wide association studies (GWAS) on disease resistance, abiotic stress tolerance, maturity and yield, gene discovery, comparative mapping, and studies on rice population genetics and domestication.

She works closely with gene banks to develop pre-breeding resources that facilitate the use of wild species in plant improvement, has shown that genes from low-yielding landrace varieties and wild relatives can enhance the performance of modern high-yielding cultivars, and recently released the first red-pericarp rice variety in the US. She was a founding member of the Gramene database and currently serves as PI for the Genomics & Open Source Breeding Informatics Initiative (GOBii). She has trained scores of young scientists throughout the world and has received numerous research, teaching and faculty awards. She is an elected a fellow of the AAAS and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. She is currently chair of DivSeek Intl.

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