Plant Breeding

PROGRAM INFORMATION

Program Director: E. Rios 
Program Coordinator: E. Kampf 

Plant Breeding is an interdisciplinary and interdepartmental graduate program that provides comprehensive training to prepare well-rounded and career-ready plant breeders for academic, industry, non-profit and other sectors. Our integrated curriculum equips students with traditional and contemporary breeding methodologies, including analysis of breeding trials, breeding methods and techniques, bioinformatics, gene editing, genomic prediction and quantitative genetics.

The Plant Breeding Graduate Program offers a Doctor of Philosophy degree that provides students with a strong background in experimental design and analysis during the first semester, and plant breeding theory and methods during the second semester. Our plant breeding faculty work with 50 plant species and represent diverse disciplines including: cell biology, genomics, molecular genetics, plant pathology, quantitative genetics & biometrics. For a complete faculty listing, please see the last page of this document.

To graduate in the program, students are required to have a minimum of 40 credits of coursework toward their major. Students must take all the 7 required courses listed below for a total of 20 credits of required courses and must additionally choose a minimum of 20 additional credits from the list of elective courses.

Minimum requirements for this degree are available in the Graduate Degrees section of this catalog. Successful applicants should have a B.S. or M.S. in agricultural, horticultural, forestry, biological or chemical sciences with desirable advanced undergraduate coursework in genetics, statistics, plant breeding, and biochemistry. However, outstanding students from a broad range of science and engineering disciplines will be considered.

All doctoral students must have at least one first author publication submitted to a peer-reviewed journal in their research field before graduation. Our students are strongly encouraged to publish before graduating.

Contact program director Dr. Esteban Rios at estebanrios@ufl.edu or 352-301-2244
Contact program coordinator Eliana Kampf at elianak@ufl.edu​ or 352-273-4760

For more information, please visit https://programs.ifas.ufl.edu/plant-breeding/graduate-program/

DEGREES OFFERED WITH A MAJOR IN PLANT Breeding

• Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

PLANT Breeding COURSES

The Plant Breeding Ph.D. degree will require a minimum of 90 post-baccalaureate credit hours and will include required courses, elective courses and dissertation research. To graduate in the program, students are required to have a minimum of 40 credits of coursework toward their major. All students are required to take 20 credits of required courses and must additionally choose a minimum of 20 additional credits from the list of elective courses.

Students must take the following 20 credits of required courses toward the Plant Breeding major:

REQUIRED COURSES

Students must choose a minimum of 20 credits from the list of electives below:

ELECTIVE COURSES

Students admitted with an M.S. degree may be able to transfer up to 30 credits toward their elective courses requirement from a regionally accredited institution or international equivalent, subject to existing UF Graduate School policies.

The number of dissertation research credits will vary according to the student’s field of study and progression toward research and degree.

Agronomy Departmental Courses

Environmental Horticulture Departmental Courses

Horticultural Sciences Departmental Courses

School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences Departmental Courses

Research Credits

Plant Breeding (PHD)

• SLO 1 (Knowledge): Students explain and apply fundamental theory and principles of plant breeding, such as genetics and genomics, plant biochemistry, plant transformation technologies, and computational genetics.
• SLO 2 (Knowledge): Students apply genetic inheritance theory to crops of interest and develop a research proposal and a dissertation for a targeted crop/trait/method based on the biology of the crop and the technology available. 
• SLO 3 (Skills): Students use critical thinking to revise scientific literature and to evaluate, plan, analyze, and design experiments related to plant breeding and cultivar development. 
• SLO 4 (Skills): Students prepare and complete plant breeding research of sufficient quality to be published in peer-reviewed journals. 
• SLO 5 (Skills): Students communicate plant breeding knowledge effectively and clearly in oral form to peers, scientists, industry, producers, and the general public. 
• SLO 6 (Professional Behavior): Students interact with peers, faculty, and staff with honesty, respect, ethical behavior, cultural sensitivity, fellowship, and cooperation.