8 SEEDWORLD.COM/CANADA JULY 2026 Scholarships | CPBI ‘26 WHEN VINCENT FETTERLEY first saw it happen in the field, the science stopped being theoretical. He had crossed two wheat plants himself — one resistant to stripe rust, the other vulnerable. Months later, standing among rows of infected wheat covered in yellow disease streaks, he could suddenly see genetics playing out in real time. “There was this really clear segrega tion,” he recalls. “Three resistant plants for every susceptible one.” For Fetterley, it was the moment plant breeding transformed from an aca demic discipline into something closer to engineering biology. “That’s when it clicked,” he says. “You can actually build plants with the traits you want.” Now, the University of British Columbia PhD student is being recog nized with a Canadian Plant Breeding Innovation (CPBI) Scholarship for research that could help modernize one of agriculture’s most misunderstood crops: hemp. His PhD research at UBC’s Michael Smith Laboratories focuses on hemp genomics, flowering time genetics, fibre quality, and high-throughput phe notyping — essentially building the tools breeders need to accelerate hemp improvement at scale. One of his most ambitious projects involves developing a computer-vision pipeline capable of rapidly analyzing hemp stem anatomy and fibre char acteristics from images — a low-cost, high-throughput alternative to slower traditional fibre analysis techniques. It is the kind of work increasingly reshaping agriculture: combining biology with automation, imaging, and machine learning to make breeding dramatically faster and more precise. His supervisor, Marco Todesco, says Fetterley has already identified multiple genetic loci controlling flowering time in hemp during the first years of his PhD. More importantly, Todesco says, Fetterley understands the broader vision behind the science. Fetterley believes agriculture is enter ing an era where advances once reserved for major commodity crops will become accessible to smaller, historically over looked crops through cheaper sequenc HEMP HAS A BRANDING PROBLEM AND VINCENT FETTERLEY WANTS TO FIX THAT For decades, hemp research lagged other crops because of its association with cannabis. Now this PhD student is helping build the breeding infrastructure that could finally unlock its industrial potential. ing technologies, AI, and shared global datasets. In practical terms, that could mean global genomic databases, shared diver sity panels, and open-access breeding tools for crops previously considered too niche to justify major investment. Colleagues say Fetterley is par ticularly well-suited to that transition because of the speed at which he absorbs new information. University of Alberta wheat breeder Gurcharn Singh Brar describes him as having an “insatiable appetite for sci ence.” He recalls Fetterley reading an entire classical rust genetics textbook within two weeks early in his master’s program and returning with pages of research ideas and questions. Fetterley himself attributes much of his learning not to working alone, but to aggressively seeking out people smarter than he is. “Science is too broad now for anyone to be an expert in everything,” he says. “A huge part of learning is networking, talking to people who know more than you, and using those conversations to identify knowledge gaps.” That collaborative mindset may be exactly what agriculture needs next. As climate pressures intensify and global food systems search for lower- input, multi-purpose crops, hemp is attracting renewed attention. But real izing its potential will require an entirely new generation of breeders — scientists capable of moving seamlessly between greenhouses, genomic datasets, AI tools, and field trials. Researchers like Vincent Fetterley are already building that future. For UBC’s Vincent Fetterley, hemp represents one of the biggest untapped opportunities in sustainable agriculture.
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