Professor Rex Bernardo

The Bernardo research group conducts research on the application of statistical genetics to plant improvement. In particular, they investigate the use of cheap and abundant DNA markers to improve complex plant traits such as yield. This work involves the analysis and interpretation of large amounts of unbalanced maize data from field trials conducted at multiple years and locations and of single nucleotide polymorphism marker data. The statistical analysis is typically done in a mixed-model framework with extensive cross validation, hence requiring high-performance computing resources.