Progress 05/01/23 to 10/31/23

Outputs
Target Audience:Our target audience was graduate students in plant sciences and supporting technologies, industry and public sector plant breeders, as well as undergraduate students. In developing our program, webalanced sessions and speaking slots to ensure gender balance and provided opportunities for underrepresented minorities and early career scientists to present their work. Students and early career scientistshad ample opportunitiesto mix with established faculty and a broad array of industry breeders. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Two workshops: Student Soft Skills and Breeding Tools, were organized. The Student Soft Skills workshop was sponsored by Bayer Crop Science® and Corteva Agriscience™. The purpose of this workshop was for graduate students to better understand and learn specific skills that are generally useful in life but specifically when working in industry and looking for a successful development of one's career. This workshop provided the following opportunities for students: Learning skills to help balance workload and prioritize tasks Manage to have a healthy balance between work and life. Understand the why and the how in relationships at work Interact with course participants to share your story Gain insights from a panel of industry representatives including recent graduates on their experience. Breeding Tools workshop was organized byNational Research Support Project 10 (NRSP10)andtheBreeding Insight Project.The goal of this workshop was to familiarize breeders with three important breeding tools: the publicly available Breeding Information Management System (BIMS) for managing breeding data, the Field Book App for phenotype data collection, and the Breeding Insight Project. Teh workshop provided following: BIMS training Setting up and using Field Book Overview of Breeding Insight How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Conference announcements were broadly distributed using the NAPB electronic newsletter, e-mails to NAPB members, the NAPB website (plantbreeding.org), the Education Committee's web-based seminar series sponsored through SeedWorld, LINKEDIN, and other social networking sites, eXtension.org (http://www.extension.org/plant_breeding_genomics), and commodity groups or other listservs. The meeitng website was organized to house all relevant informaiton. Oral sessions were recorded and recordings will be made publicly available 6 months after the conference using NAPB YouTube channel. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Nothing Reported

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? We delivered a program that included speakers on cutting-edge plant breeding research topics and issues of importance to plant breeding. The conference provided opportunities for early career scientists, postdocs, and undergraduate and graduate students to participate and showcase their work. Keeping with the meeting theme, thespeakers discussed plant breeding in an agroecological context and examined the concepts of plant breeding for sustainability along with the technologies, methodologies, and genetic resources that could be utilized. Preference was given to Project Directors who have had or currently have USDA NIFA-funded projects in plant breeding to participate as speakers to highlight some of the research they have completed or are currently doing. We haveprovided a retrospective on the crossroads of food and agriculture in the Southeast through session involving culinary-driven plant breeding (day 1 of the conference), stakeholder involvement in participatory plant breeding with a focus on diversity, both in crops and the workforce (day 2), and future developments in technologies concerning their impact on climate and sustainability of agriculture (day 3). Overall,the conference accomplished the following: Provided scientific stimulation by cutting-edge oral and poster presentations, including NIFA-funded (A1141) projects; Showcased local public and private breeding activities; Appreciation of diversity both in crops and the workforce; Networking of students and post-docs with potential employers; Networking among participants to develop novel research ideas; A white paper summarizing, in particular, the sessions on Day 3 on the future of plant breeding with a focus on climate change and sustainable agriculture;

Publications