Stephen Kresovich

Robert and Lois Coker Trustees Endowed Chair of Genetics
Plant and Environmental Sciences Department, Public Service Activities, Genetics and Biochemistry Department

Office: 318 Biosystems Research Center
Phone: 864-656-1194

Email: SKRESOV@clemson.edu
Personal Website: http://skgenomics.com

Educational Background

Ph.D. Agronomy (Crop Physiology and Genetics)
The Ohio State University 1982

M.S. Agronomy
Texas A&M University 1977

A.B. Biology
Washington and Jefferson College 1974

Profile

Stephen Kresovich joined Clemson University in July 2013 as the Robert and Lois Coker Trustees Endowed Chair of Genetics in the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences. In this role, Dr. Kresovich serves as director of the Advanced Plant Technology Program. This initiative is charged to integrate advances in genetics and genomics to solve problems in agriculture, the environment, and human health. Our activities focus on building coordinated crop breeding and genetics programs to support stakeholders in South Carolina.

Research addresses conservation and use of genetic and genomic resources of crop plants including sorghum, maize, and sugar cane. Dr. Kresovich has more than 175 peer-reviewed publications and also has developed a number of commercially released hybrids of sorghum and sugar cane. Dr. Kresovich is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Crop Science Society of America.

Currently, Dr. Kresovich serves as the lead Principal Investigator (PI) or Co-PI on a number of regional, national, and international grants.

Research Interests

Over the past decade, tremendous progress has been made to advance our understanding of crop genome organization, variation, and evolution, particularly as it relates to potential discovery and exploitation of useful genic or genotypic diversity in plants. Critical to this progress has been advances in molecular biology/genetics, genomics, and computational biology as well as thoughtful applications of the theories of evolutionary biology and plant breeding. It is well recognized that a crop genome is a dynamic unit whose organization and variation has been molded by evolutionary processes and human intervention.

Our research objectives are: (1) to identify genes of the sorghum, sugar cane, and maize genomes impacting evolution, domestication or crop improvement, (2) to characterize and understand the relationship between DNA sequence variation and desirable phenotypes, (3) to characterize molecular and phenotypic diversity of sorghum, sugar cane, and maize in natural populations, landraces, and elite germplasm, and (4) to develop and test strategies to efficiently discover, conserve, and use variation in natural populations and genebank collections by integrating current advances in genomics, bioinformatics, and plant genetics/breeding.

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