Peggy Ozias-Akins is Professor of Horticulture at the University of Georgia’s Tifton Campus. She also serves as the Director of UGA’s Institute of Plant Breeding, Genetics & Genomics which includes faculty and affiliated members at Athens, Griffin, and Tifton campuses. Dr. Ozias-Akins received her B.S. degree in Biology from Florida State University, Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Florida, carried out postdoctoral research as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for Plant Breeding in Cologne, Germany, and joined UGA as Assistant Professor in 1986. As a UGA Distinguished Research Professor and D.W. Brooks Distinguished Professor, Dr. Ozias-Akins is recognized for her research on apomictic reproduction in grasses and peanut molecular genetics. Her group cloned the first gene for parthenogenesis, a component of apomixis, from a natural apomict, and demonstrated its function in multiple grasses including pearl millet, rice, and maize. She served as co-chair of the International Peanut Genome Sequencing project that culminated in the generation of genome sequence from cultivated peanut and its diploid progenitors and works with breeders to translate genome information to facilitate crop improvement. Dr. Ozias-Akins is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for In Vitro Biology, and the American Peanut Research and Education Society.