2024 Conservation Systems Soybean Researcher Of The Year
Dr. Caio Canella Vieira, Assistant Professor of Soybean Breeding Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, Fayetteville, Arkansas has been named the “2024 Conservation Systems Soybean Researcher of the Year” at the 27th Annual National Conservation Systems Cotton & Rice Conference, Southern Soybean & Corn Conference, Delta States Irrigation Conference and the Southern Precision Ag Conference,
Dr. Vieira’s interest in soybean breeding started when he was introduced to the world of plant sciences by his older brother who was working on a plant science degree. Dr. Vieira went on to finish the first two years of his undergraduate studies at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, under Baldin Pinheiro”s guidance. He studied for a year at the University of Minnesota and was a visiting scholar at Purdue University under the supervision of Katy Rainey before earning his master’s and a doctorate in plant breeding, genetics, and genomics at the University of Missouri-Columbia with Chen and Henry Nguyen as his advisors.
Dr. Vieira received the Monsanto Graduate Student Scholarship in 2018, was named a National Association of Plant Breeders Borlaug Scholar in 2019 and received the Corteva DELTA Scholarship in 2021.
Dr. Vieira has worked on projects that address many issues, disease and pest resistance and economic factors of increasing yield and oil content. Vieria also worked on a study to identify soybean varieties tolerant of off-target dicamba herbicide. Other projects Vieira has focused on include: soybean resistance to southern root-knot nematode; conversions of elite soybean lines to herbicide-resistant backgrounds; development of food-grade elite soybean lines; genomic selection in early stages of the breeding pipeline and the release of elite soybean lines with broad and abiotic stress tolerance and improved seed quality traits.
Dr. Vieira has experience in planning and managing field experiments, plot data collection, soil sampling, installation and maintenance of irrigation systems and molecular and multi-environmental data analysis.
As an assistant professor in crop, soil and environmental sciences department, Dr. Vieira will also teach plant breeding through the Dale Bumpers College of Agriculture, Food and Life Sciences at the University of Arkansas.