Moira J. Sheehan

Dr. Moira Sheehan is the Director of Breeding Insight (BI) at the University of Florida, Gainesville (previously at Cornell). BI is a USDA-ARS initiative funded since 2018 to bring genomic and phenomics tools and software solutions to ARS crop and livestock breeders currently spanning 31 species.  She received her Ph.D. in Plant Biology from Cornell University in Tom Brutnell’s lab on light signaling pathways in maize and completed her Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from Virginia Tech. She received a USDA-ARS postdoctoral fellowship to study meiotic pairing in maize for three years in Dr. Wojtek Pawlowski’s lab in Plant Breeding at Cornell University. At the end of that grant, she took a Research Assistant postdoctoral position in Dr. Ed Buckler IV’s lab at Cornell University studying maize plant height QTLs, biofuel grass genomics, and aberrations in polyploidy. After these two postdoctoral appointments, she went on to work for Nature Source Improved Plants (previously Nature Source Genetics) as a Research Scientist and Project Manager for nine years. In that time, she had worked with 12 different crops to help major and small seed companies optimize their breeding pipelines. Moira’s expertise is in molecular breeding, polyploidy, specialty crop breeding, technology transfer, project management, and breaking things to make something better.