The 2020 virtual meeting of the National Association of Plant Breeders began today. We sit down with Borlaug Scholar David Tork to talk about the intricacies of modern flax breeding.
Tork is a second-year MS student at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. After gaining initial plant breeding experience as an intern at Dow AgroSciences (now Corteva), and later, at the University of Minnesota grape breeding program, he decided to pursue a full-time career in plant breeding. He received a BS in plant science with honors from the University of Minnesota in 2018, and then joined the Applied Plant Science graduate program to study perennial flax breeding under advisors Dr. Neil O. Anderson and Dr. Donald Wyse. Tork has worked to increase the pace of perennial flax domestication by expanding breeding nurseries and integrating his published ideotype framework for pursuing multiple breeding objectives simultaneously.
