A.K. (Danny) Singh is a Professor of Agronomy and G.F. Sprague Chair in Agronomy at Iowa State University. I serve as co-director of the Iowa Soybean Research Center and Associate Chair of Discovery and Engagement in the Department of Agronomy. He holds a courtesy appointment as a Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering at Iowa State University.

Upon receiving a Ph.D. degree from the University of Guelph in 2007, Danny joined Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada as a durum wheat breeder. In 2013, he moved to Iowa State University as a soybean breeder. His group’s research interests are machine learning applications in breeding and automation of breeding pipelines to develop competitive and climate-resilient varieties. He collaborates with experts from several disciplines, including plant sciences, engineering, and computer sciences. He was instrumental in establishing the concept of Cyber-Agricultural Systems with applications in plant breeding and crop production.

Danny’s professional interest is to help improve agricultural production and use research/breeding activities to benefit farmers and the agriculture industry by developing superior soybean cultivars and germplasm for farmers and other stakeholders. Our breeding efforts focus on soybean and millets. He has participated in the development of >75 cultivars (annually grown in >10 million acres) and 13 germplasm lines, published >160 peer-reviewed publications, and served as a PI/co-PI on projects from multiple agencies in Canada and the U.S.A. He has given >75 invited talks nationally and internationally. He has co-authored the textbook “Plant Breeding and Cultivar Development” ISBN: 978-0-12-817563-7. [https://www.elsevier.com/books/plant-breeding-and-cultivar-development/…] He leads two graduate courses at ISU.

He is passionate about advancing plant breeding and interdisciplinary sciences to solve farmer production issues, improve sustainability, and enhance profitability. He maintains extensive interactions with farmers to understand the complex problems, soliciting feedback and developing partnerships with farmers and the industry to create timely solutions, primarily through genetics, breeding, phenomics, genomics and cyber-agricultural systems methods and tools.

He is an elected fellow of the Crop Science Society of America.