Jianming Yu is Professor, Pioneer Distinguished Chair in Maize Breeding, and Director of Raymond F. Baker Center for Plant Breeding in the Department of Agronomy, Iowa State University. The focus of Yu’s program is to address significant questions in quantitative genetics by combining cutting-edge genomic technologies and plant breeding. Maize and sorghum are two major crops with annual nurseries with thousands of research plots, but the group has worked on many other crops through collaboration and open data (rice, wheat, oat, peanut, and soybean). He earned his B.S. from Northwest A&F University in 1994, M.S. from Kansas State University in 2000, and Ph.D. from University of Minnesota in 2003. He worked at Kansas State University from 2006 to 2012 and then moved to Iowa State University in 2013. His research integrates knowledge in quantitative genetics, genomics, plant breeding, molecular genetics, and statistics, and has the goal of developing and implementing new strategies and methods in complex trait dissection and crop improvement. He has made significant contributions in research discoveries and community leadership and service. Among other honors, Yu was elected to Fellow of Crop Science Society of America and Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Much of Yu’s research has been focused on investigating the genetic architecture of quantitative and qualitative traits with evolutionary and agricultural importance, the interplay of genes, environment, and development underlying phenotypic variation, and the strategies to enhance crop improvement by design optimization and prediction. Yu’s significant research contributions include developing the integrated framework for both gene discovery underlying phenotypic plasticity and performance prediction across environments, developing the mixed model framework for genome-wide association studies, outlining the nested association mapping strategy, pioneering genomic selection research in crops, prototyping a comprehensive strategy to turbocharge genebanks to mine the natural heritage, quantifying genic and nongenic contributions to quantitative trait variation in maize, identifying the Shattering1 gene and its homologs underlying the parallel domestication of multiple cereal species (sorghum, maize, rice, and foxtail millet), uncovering a domestication triangle involving sorghum tannin and the pair of Tannin1 and Tannin2 genes, and revealing the patterns in DNA base composition divergence and chromosome size variation across multiple species.