About the 2013 Lecturer | Dr. Marc Albertsen

Dr. Marc Albertsen is a Senior Research Fellow/Director of DuPont Pioneer’s Research for Enhanced Adaptation and Crop Hybridization (REACH) group, a research discovery team assembled to address the challenges of crop production in the next decade by working to expand the environmental adaptation of maize and to increase the reproductive productivity of crops in general. He is also the Pioneer lead for two philanthropic, multi-partner collaborations, each with the goal of improving the lives of subsistence farmers in Africa. One of these is the Africa Biofortified Sorghum (ABS) project, which is developing nutritionally-enhanced sorghum to enhance the lives of people dependent upon sorghum for their staple diet. The other is the Improved Maize for African Soils (IMAS) project, which is improving the nitrogen use efficiency of maize for subsistence farmers through a combination of conventional, molecular, and transgenic breeding.

Before his current roles, he directed the Agronomic Traits Discovery and Validation Department in the development of maize with improved drought tolerance, nitrogen use efficiency and yield, and in the development of soybeans with improved yield. The department also was responsible for developing and delivering genetics-based technology to lower the cost of producing hybrid maize and for applying this technology to produce hybrids in other crops.

Dr. Albertsen has over 31 years of research and leadership experience at DuPont Pioneer in reproductive biology and agronomic traits with a background that combines genetics, cytogenetics, crop breeding, cytology, molecular biology, and plant physiology. He has authored or co-authored 25 refereed journal articles, over 60 additional professional article and abstracts, more than 44 patents, and has been invited to make over 30 presentations at scientific meetings worldwide.

Dr. Albertsen holds a doctorate in Plant Breeding and Genetics from the University of Minnesota, a master’s degree in Plant Breeding and Cytogenetics from Iowa State University, and a bachelor’s degree in Botany from Iowa State University. He pursued postdoctoral studies at Iowa State University before joining Pioneer. He was elected as a Fellow of the Iowa Academy of Sciences in 1984. In 2005, he was named as a member of the Pioneer Inventor Hall of Fame and was recognized as the Iowa Inventor of the Year by the Iowa Intellectual Property Law Association in 2008. In 2011, he received the DuPont Lavoisier Medal for Technical Achievement, an award that honors scientists and engineers from throughout the DuPont Company for outstanding contributions during their career. His latest recognition was being named a Fellow of the Crop Science Society of America at the 2012 American Society of Agronomy meetings.