about

Welcome! My name is Jenna and I’m an Assistant Professor of Vegetable Breeding and Genetics in the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences at Clemson University. I’m located at the Pee Dee Research & Education Center in Florence, South Carolina. Check out my new lab website here!

Prior to Clemson, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate co-mentored by Dr. Allison Miller at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and Dr. Brandon Schlautman at The Land Institute. My research focused on the development and evaluation of new selection and evaluation methods for practical application in plant breeding programs. Through my postdoc, I explored the use of spectral datasets to improve efficiency in the domestication of perennial grain and legume crops. Find out more about my current and past research projects on my research page.

I recently completed my Ph.D. in Plant Breeding and Genetics in Mike Gore’s lab at Cornell University (June 2021). For my dissertation, I studied the genetics, genomics, and transcriptomics of sweet corn nutritional quality traits and developed near-infrared spectroscopy-based approaches and analysis tools for the phenotyping of quality traits in cassava. Prior to Cornell, I received a B.S. in Horticulture and a minor in African Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Throughout my time at UW-Madison, I worked with Dr. Phil Simon in the USDA-ARS Carrot Genetics group as an undergraduate research assistant. Parallel to my work in horticulture, I studied Swahili and spent a semester abroad in Kenya with MSID, a program focused on international development. I’ve enjoyed having these interests intersect in my graduate work and plan to continue pursuing both as I move forward.

I am passionate about food security and envision a world in which appropriate, nutrient-dense cultivars are in the hands of smallholder farmers. I want to use my career to empower plant breeders both in the United States and abroad to efficiently create improved plant varieties through the development of user-friendly tools and effective breeding strategies. By focusing at the intersection of operations research, nutritional genomics, and informatics, I believe that I can make a substantial contribution towards these goals, but it is only through strong collaborations with experts in these fields and with breeding program partners in CGIAR and national agricultural research systems (NARS) that true progress will be made.

When I’m not coding or thinking about science, I enjoy spending my time quilting and baking.

research

I am interested in international agriculture and rural development with a focus on breeding for improved nutritional quality. I want to empower resource-limited plant breeding programs through the development and deployment of appropriate and user-friendly tools for data capture, storage, and reproducible analyses.

Jenna with PDREC sign
Handful of butter beans
Tractor planting butter beans

Vegetable breeding at Clemson's Pee Dee Research & Education Center

Housed at Clemson's Pee Dee Research & Education Center in Florence, South Carolina, my research group is focused on breeding vegetables with improved flavor and nutritional value for the region. Read more about our work on our lab website.

clover leaves on a lightbox
Silphium plants on the LemnaTec
scanning clover leaves

Phenomic selection for domestication of new perennial crops

This project, funded by the Foundation for Food & Agriculture, seeks to speed up the domestication process for three potential perennial crops: Silphium, sainfoin, and intermediate wheatgrass (Kernza).

alone in cassava field
NaCRRI NIRS
group in cassava field

PhenoApps

The PhenoApps project is focused on the development of Android apps for the efficient collection of plant phenotypes. Our open-source apps are available for free on Google Play and the source code can be found on GitHub. Throughout the project, I have collaborated closely with Nextgen Cassava to explore the use of low-cost near-infrared spectrometers for quality trait prediction in fresh cassava roots. This work led to the creation of a flexible spectral data analysis pipeline in the form of an R package (waves, available on CRAN) and Cassavabase GUI tool. Both are described in our recent peer-reviewed manscript in the Plant Phenome Journal. Our team has also developed an Android app, Prospector, to improve spectrometer workflows for a breeding program context. We recently released a preprint on this work and it is also available on Google Play. This project is made possible by NSF-BREAD IOS-1543958 and the USAID under Cooperative Agreement No. 7200AA‐19LE‐00005, the Feed the Future Innovation lab for Crop Improvement.

Liquid N
Peeking through corn
Lab

Sweet corn nutritional quality

In 2019, I was awarded a USDA NIFA AFRI EWD Predoctoral fellowship titled Integrating transcriptomics for the improvement of genetic dissection and prediction of provitamin A and vitamin E in fresh sweet corn kernels. Last summer, I grew out a panel of diverse sweet corn inbred lines and harvested fresh kernels for RNA-seq. RNA has been extracted and we're now analyzing the sequenced transcripts to study the control of carotenoid and tocochromanol traits through transcriptome-wide association and prediction.

Carrot cages
Purple carrot
Carrot flower

Carrot breeding and genetics

During my time in the Simon Lab at UW-Madison, I worked on the first iteration of the USDA NIFA OREI Carrot Improvement for Organic Agriculture project. I was involved in every stage of the carrot breeding program, from planting and cage building for fly pollination to DNA extraction, HPLC prep, and tissue culture, and loved every part of it. It's safe to say that my experience with the carrot group inspired me to pursue a graduate education in plant breeding and genetics. My family likes to joke that the true start of my career was my (single line) speaking part in a BigTen Network special on breeding carrots for color and flavor. Watch the video here and judge for yourself! ⇩