Wehner Honored with Career Award

Dr. Todd C. Wehner was presented with the career award at the international meeting of EUCARPIA VI, the European plant breeding organization, in Warsaw, Poland.

Dr. Todd C. Wehner is leader of the cucumber and watermelon breeding project at North Carolina State University-Raleigh. He also does research on melon and Asian gourds. His research has emphasized improved selection methods; recurrent selection for fruit yield, earliness and quality; resistance to chilling, nematodes, anthracnose, belly rot, gummy stem blight, powdery mildew, downy mildew and potyviruses; and germplasm evaluation. His objectives are to provide industry with new traits for the development of improved cultivars, research information, and graduate students who can run field plant breeding programs.

Dr. Wehner served as assistant department head, and has taught courses at NC State, including plant breeding and vegetable production. Recently, he has been an instructor for DELTA (NCSU online distance education), teaching HS 541 Plant Breeding Methods since 2010, HS 709 Plant Breeding Overview since 2011, and HS 863 Integrated Breeding Databases. He has been an instructor for the Plant Breeding Academy-America at UC Davis since 2006, and also works for PBA-Asia and PBA-Africa.

Dr. Wehner has released 62 cultivars and breeding lines, published 174 journal articles, 18 book chapters, and more than 700 articles and reports. He has trained 38 graduate students, 100 undergraduate interns, 7 postdoctoral research associates, and 21 visiting scientists. He was an advisor for production of pickling cucumber in Sri Lanka in 1993, watermelon in China in 1999 and 2008, and Poland in 2004. He participated in expeditions to collect germplasm from China in 1994, the Republic of South Africa in 1996, and Turkmenistan in 2008, and traveled professionally in Israel, Mexico, the Czech Republic, France, Turkey, and Kenya. Dr. Wehner has his A.B. in Botany (UC Berkeley), M.S. in Agronomy and Ph.D. in Plant Breeding (University of Wisconsin-Madison).

• Written by Dr. Todd Wehner