b'I needed an internship, and in remote Idaho most of my classmates were interning at big potato farms or local ag service providers, and that just didnt interest me, Nelson says. I wanted something a little more rig-orous. One day I read an article that claimed that some new GMO technol-ogy would cause mass sterility in the plant kingdom. I saw right through the propaganda and applied for internships at that company! I saw an exciting new technology and that really interested me.He was able to get an internship at a soybean research breeding site in Iowa, and the next summer, at a corn breeding site in Michigan.Those were the moments that Nelson says he knew he would become a plant breeder. While soybean initially caught Nelsons breeding interest, it didnt take long for him to be bitten by the corn bug. He followed this bug to North Carolina State University, where he studied for his MS and PhD under Dr. Major Goodman, an expert in maize breeding, with a strong focus in statis-tics and genetics. Paul would likely beWhen Nelson finally graduated in 2009, there were few newly trained corn breeders available for companies.embarrassed to beIn the late 90s and early 2000s, molecular markers and marker assisted breeding was all the rage, so a lot of students went into labs and didnt get a classical quantitative genetics and breeding experience, called a Future Giant,Nelson says. There was actually a shortage of breeding graduates, so there were a lot of opportunities.yet this speaks to hisAnd the opportunity that popped up? A job at a breeding site in north-west Iowa, run by Monsanto (now Bayer). It was the perfect job; a fully-staffed breeding site in the heart of corn humility, which is acountry, lacking only a breeder to run the line-development breeding pro-gram, he says. And that was exactly what I wanted to do. It was a great, critical component ofgreat decision and career move, and it set me on the path Im on today. Opportunities to Grow and Learnthe great leadershipIts not just on-the-job training and opportunities that have pushed Nelson to grow and climb, associations have helped provide new experiences, too.skills he possesses. One opportunity in particular that encouraged his leadership growth was working on the American Seed Trade Associations (ASTA) molecular marker working group.Stephen Smith, lecturer at The ASTA opportunity presented itself because of a paper Nelson Iowa State University wrote as a graduate student. Stephen Smith, an author of the paper and someone incredibly involved with ASTA, wanted to use the marker data from the paper, Nelson says. He knew I worked at Monsanto, so he contacted me to get involved with the study they were working on.Though Nelson had some initial hesitation about joining the working group, due to the demands of managing a breeding program, he says he had excellent support from his leaders at Bayer and it opened an opportu-nity to engage with scientists across the industry toward a common goal. Nelson participated as the technical expert on the working group until 2015 when he was asked to chair the group. A colleague and mentor of mine asked me if Id be willing to chair the working group, Nelson says. I told him that I didnt know how to chair a working group and he responded with a laugh: Sure you do!Nelson chaired the ASTA molecular marker working group for five years, where he worked closely with scientists from across the seedindustryscientists ranging from Bayer to Corteva to universities to USDA offices. 18/ SEEDWORLD.COMSEPTEMBER 2021'