Distinguished Career Award
2025 Award Winner
Dr. Jon Welles
Science Fellow at LI-COR
Jon's career at LI-COR began in 1981, overlapping a number of years of graduate work with John Norman, both at the University of Nebraska Agronomy Dept and before that, at Penn State's Meteorology Dept. Prof Norman's interests covered the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum, and he was a clever instrumentationalist: if a device didn't exist for what he needed to measure, he would build it himself. The many projects in his lab included a portable photosynthesis system, and various devices for measuring plant canopy structure (one looked like a little pine cone, another was pulled along a track by an HO scale locomotive). All of this was invaluable preparation; Jon’s graduate thesis work focused on radiation transfer in vegetative canopies, and that saw fruition in the LAI-2000 and LAI-2200 Plant Canopy Analyzers, devices for quickly determining canopy structure. Jon has played key roles in the conceptual design and software implementation of 4 generations of portable photosynthesis systems (LI-6000 in 1983, LI-6200 in 1985, LI-6400 in 1995, and LI-6800 in 2015), and the numerous stand-alone gas analyzers that have followed along. Another key contribution has the development of calibration techniques, protocols, and software for much of LI-COR’s gas analyzer and photosynthesis system instrumentation.
Jon has long considered his job at LI-COR to be that of a tool maker for LI-COR’s customers, letting them do things they couldn’t before. Successful tools are very much a team effort, and Jon appreciates being able to contribute to the talented one at LI-COR.
2024 Award Winner
Dr. David Ertl
Former Director of Production Technology at Iowa Corn Promotion Board
Profile
David received his B.S. in Agronomy from the University of Connecticut and M.S. and Ph.D. from Iowa State University in Plant Breeding. He worked at Pioneer Hi-Bred for 23 years as a corn breeder where he developed several commercial hybrids and as a Research Director, where he led the Performance Predictability Team. For the past 13 years, he has been working for Iowa Corn in research. At Iowa Corn, he was immediately asked by grower leaders to work on phenotyping, to leverage the newly sequenced corn genome. David was involved in the initiation of the Genomes To Fields Initiative, is serving on the Executive Board and has continued to support that work and has secured funding to help sustain that over the past 10 years. He was involved in the first NAPPN conference, held at Purdue in 2016 and again has supported that as it developed and secured funding. David was elected to the inaugural NAPPN board and served three years in that role, helping to provide structure and governance to this newly formed organization.
David has made multiple trips to Washington DC since 2015 securing federal funding for phenomics research, both through USDA-ARS for Genomes To Fields and USDA-NIFA for the Agricultural Genome To Phenome Initiative (AG2PI), which he assisted in getting into the 2018 Farm Bill and has subsequently lobbied for appropriations from Congress. He is currently serving on the Executive Board for AG2PI.
David is author or co-author on 30 journal articles, a book chapter and is an inventor on 15 U.S. patents. David retired from his career in agriculture June 2024.