Planning Committee

Réka Howard is an Associate Professor and Director of Consulting in the Department of Statistics and a Courtesy Professor in the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She received a PhD in Statistics and Plant Breeding from Iowa State University. Her research interests are in statistical consulting, statistical method development for genomic prediction, and the application of statistical methods in plant breeding. Her recent work focuses on the optimization of statistical methods for genomic prediction, and model development for genotype by environmental interaction for genomic prediction. Dr Howard teaches statistical consulting and statistical methods for BS, MS and PhD students in statistics, agronomy, animal science, engineering and related fields.

Philip Dixon is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University. His research centers on developing and evaluating statistical methods to answer biological questions, and his research interests include ecological and environmental statistics, mathematical biology, and computational modeling. He previously worked as a biostatistician at the Savannah River Ecology Lab administered by the University of Georgia. He earned his A.B. in biology from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.S. in statistics from Cornell University, and a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell University.

Julia Piaskowski is the Director of Statistical Programs at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at University of Idaho. She provides resources to support high quality analysis of agriculture studies and adjacent research. Dr. Piaskowski views herself as a 'user advocate' attempting to bridge the gap between complex statistical methodologies/tools and what users actually need to use those. Additionally, she is a Software Carpentries certified instructor.

Josefina Lacasa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics at Kansas State University. Her research lies at the intersection between statistics and agriculture. She works to improve the quantitative methods applied by agricultural researchers. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of experimental design, applied Bayesian statistics and agricultural statistics.

Guilherme Rosa is a Professor in the Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences, with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Biostatistics & Medical Informatics, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He received his Ph.D. in Statistics and Agricultural Experimentation from the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, in 1998. Dr. Rosa’s work focuses on teaching and research in statistical and computational methods for the analysis of livestock data, including beef and dairy cattle, swine, poultry, and other species. His research spans farm-level operational data analysis to support optimized management practices, high-throughput phenotyping for real-time animal monitoring and disease surveillance, and quantitative genetics, genomics, and breeding.

Hans-Peter Piepho is a Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at University of Hohenheim, Germany. His main research interests are related to statistical procedures as needed in plant sciences, crop breeding and cultivar testing. These include genomic prediction, spatial methods for field trials, design of comparative experiments, models for genotype-environment interaction, and network meta-analysis. Moreover, he has various collaborations with researchers in different branches of the agricultural sciences. In most of his research, mixed model procedures form the methodological backbone

José Crossa is a Distinguished Scientist at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, Mexico. His research focuses on statistics in agriculture and genetics, experimental field designs and classification of genetics resources. Currently, he focuses on the optimization of genomic selection, the integration of multi-omics data for improving prediction and sparse testing.