Aaron Lorenz, assistant professor of agronomy and horticulture, is one of nine professors in the nation to be honored by the DuPont Young Professors program.
The awards are given to advance key research that is relevant to DuPont. Lorenz is part of the 2012 class of honorees.
Lorenz has been at UNL since 2010. He was honored for his work in the optimization of genomic selection for plant breeding. The award is $25,000 per year, renewed for up to three years.
Lorenz received a bachelor’s degree in agriculture-plant science from the University of Minnesota, a master’s in plant breeding from Iowa State University and a doctorate in plant breeding and genomics from the University of Wisconsin.
The 44th DuPont Young Professors class represents eight universities in the United States and one in Germany. DuPont awarded a total of $675,000.
Since the inception of the award in 1967, about 557 young professors from the United States, Europe, Asia, South America, Canada and Africa have received nearly $49 million in grants.
The DuPont Young Professor program is designed to provide start-up assistance to promising young and untenured research faculty working in areas of interest to DuPont. Research by the class of 2012 Young Professors represents key components of DuPont science and includes promising research in the fields of nanotechnology, genomics, system biology, next-generation herbicides, synthesis of natural products, carbon dioxide capture, DNA sequencing and enzymatic synthesis.