Rate My Professor Sushan Ru

Sushan Ru is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Horticulture at Auburn University College of Agriculture, where she established and leads the university's first small fruit breeding program in April 2022. This initiative focuses on developing superior blueberry cultivars adapted to Alabama and nearby regions using a combination of traditional breeding and molecular techniques. Ru earned her Ph.D. in Horticulture from Washington State University in 2016, with a dissertation titled 'Theoretical and empirical evaluation of marker-assisted seedling selection in blueberry breeding.' She previously obtained her M.S. in Horticulture from the same institution in 2011, researching 'A mechanistic view of shoot vigor in grapevines: xylem anatomy and hydraulic conductance,' and her B.S. in Horticulture from Southwest University in China in 2009. Before joining Auburn, she served as a Post-doctoral Research Associate at the University of Minnesota, working on plant breeding and genetics.

Ru's research interests center on small fruit breeding, quantitative genetics, and bioinformatics, with emphasis on enhancing blueberry production efficiency through high-throughput phenotyping, drought tolerance assessment via hyperspectral imaging, and genetic diversity analysis in rabbiteye blueberries. As principal investigator, she has secured funding from the USDA Specialty Crop Block Grant Program for projects such as 'Expanding blueberry production via high tunnels' and 'Improve the Blueberry Yield Prediction App and Extend Its Availability for iOS.' Her key publications include 'A review on blueberry drought tolerance from the perspective of physiology and breeding' (2024), 'Multivariate analysis methods improve the selection of heat-tolerant tomato genotypes' (2022, Scientific Reports), 'Transformer-based hyperspectral image analysis for phenotyping drought tolerance in blueberries' (2025), 'Pedigree analysis of rabbiteye blueberry (Vaccinium virgatum Aiton) indicates limited genetic diversity' (2025, HortScience), 'GS4PB: An R Shiny application to facilitate a genomic selection breeding pipeline' (2025), and 'A Review of Botryosphaeria Stem Blight Disease of Blueberry from the Perspective of the Host, Pathogen, and Environment' (2023). In October 2024, she won first place in the American Society for Horticultural Science Early Career Competition. Ru contributes to extension through webinars, symposia presentations like the MSU-Corteva Symposium, and grower outreach on small fruit breeding progress, impacting regional agriculture by addressing challenges in blueberry cultivation, disease resistance, and yield prediction.