Dr. Joe Bouton is Senior Vice President and Director of the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation’s Forage Improvement Division, and Professor Emeritus, University of Georgia. Dr. Bouton develops forage and bioenergy cultivars for Southern USA. He is best known for the release and commercialization of ‘Alfagraze’ alfalfa, “MaxQ” tall fescue, and ‘Durana’ and ‘Patriot’ white clovers. His switchgrass cultivar, EG1101, is currently under seed production for future sales as a biofuels crop for the southern region. For his achievements, he was presented the Carl Sprengel Research Award by the American Society of Agronomy, named Man of the Year in Service to Southeastern Agriculture by Progressive Farmer Magazine, and awarded the Richard R. Hill Achievement Award by the North American Alfalfa Improvement Conference and a Creative Research Medal by the University of Georgia.

Dr Hitz received his PhD from Iowa State University and did postdoctoral work at the DOE Plant Research Lab at Michigan State University.  For the past 25 years he has held various research positions with DuPont and DuPont/Pioneer. His research interests range from carbohydrate metabolism and transport to fatty acid and lipid synthesis. The primary outcome of the work has been metabolic engineering of grain quality in corn and soybean and has lead to many issued patents in that area.  He has been Research Director for grain quality traits in Pioneer Crop Genetics and is currently the Technical Lead for biological steps in the conversion of cellulosic feedstocks to ethanol in the Biochemical Sciences and Engineering group at DuPont.                                     

Cory Christensen has been a product manager at Ceres, Inc. since 2007.  Based in Thousand Oaks, Calif., he oversees the seed company’s pipeline of high-yielding switchgrass cultivars, from early development to commercialization, as well as external partnerships and trials. He previously led Ceres’ trait development efforts in drought and cold stress as well as enhanced biomass production. Prior to joining Ceres, he managed gene-trait discovery work at Paradigm Genetics, focusing on drought stress and herbicides. Cory holds a Ph.D. in biology from the University of Utah, where he studied plant reproductive development.