Rate My Professor Rod Wing

Rod Wing is a Regents Professor in Plant Sciences at The University of Arizona, holding the Bud Antle Endowed Chair for Excellence in Agriculture and Life Sciences and serving as Director of the Arizona Genomics Institute. He also holds appointments as Professor in the BIO5 Institute and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. Wing earned a B.A. in Biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980 and a Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of California, Davis in 1987. His early career included postdoctoral research at the USDA-ARS Plant Gene Expression Center with Sheila McCormick and at Cornell University with Steve Tanksley. From 1991 to 1996, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at Texas A&M University. He then founded the Clemson University Genomics Institute, serving as Coker Endowed Chair from 1997 to 2002. In 2002, Wing moved to the University of Arizona, establishing the Arizona Genomics Institute. He was appointed Regents Professor in 2019 and held the AXA Endowed Chair for Genome Biology and Evolutionary Genomics from 2014 to 2019. Additionally, he served as Professor and Director at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology from 2019 to 2025.

Wing's research centers on the genome biology of rice (Oryza sativa) and its wild relatives, harnessing natural variation to develop higher-yielding, stress-tolerant, and nutritious crops for global food security by 2050. His laboratory has pioneered comparative genomics across the Oryza genus, leading projects such as the International Rice Genome Sequencing Project, Oryza Map Alignment Project, and PanOryza pan-genome catalog. Key contributions include BAC library construction for multiple crops, map-based cloning, and tools like Genome Puzzle Master for pseudomolecule assembly. Notable publications encompass the draft rice genome sequence (Science, 2002), B73 maize genome (Science, 2009), soybean palaeopolyploid genome (Nature, 2010), tomato genome (Nature, 2012), and African rice genome (Nature Genetics, 2014), amassing over 73,000 citations. Awards include the USDA Secretary’s Honor Award for Superior Service (2004), Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (2010), and Foreign Fellow of India’s National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (2022).