Kate Rappaport - Agricultural Science Research Technician
Phil Edmonds- Agricultural Science Field Technician
Biographical Information
Dr.Lewers has been with the Fruit Lab since 2001, conducting research on strawberry, blackberry, and raspberry. She serves as a Research Geneticist (Plants) developing improved cultivars of these valuable fruit crops while studying inheritance of important traits and developing molecular markers and genetic maps to help track these traits in breeding populations. Her education was at Iowa State University in agronomy, integrated pest management, plant breeding, and genetics. She conducted research in Mendelian and cytogenetics as an undergraduate at Iowa State University (1976-1979), in qualitative and quantitative genetics and plant breeding as a graduate student at ISU (1990-1996), in molecular and quantitative genetic mapping as a postdoctoral research associate at ISU (1996-1998), in molecular genetic and physical mapping and bioinformatics as a postdoctoral molecular geneticist with the USDA-ARS in Beltsville, Maryland (1998-2001), and in plant breeding, marker development, polysomic inheritance, and genetic mapping as a Research Geneticist in the Fruit Laboratory at BARC (2001-present).
Research interests
Developing new cultivars (disease-resistant cultivars, cultivars that produce a continuous crop, and cultivars adapted to non-traditional growing environments such as winter protected-cultivation in greenhouses or tunnels)
Determining modes of inheritance (disomic and polysomic)
Identifying molecular markers associated with valued traits
Designing and testing cultivar development strategies to efficiently utilize marker-assisted selection.
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