Juan Ignacio Di Salvo

Position: Ph.D. Plant Breeding

Education History

• 2024 – M.S. Plant Breeding, Iowa State University
• 2019 – M.S. Integrated Plant and Soil Sciences, University of Kentucky
• 2013 – B.S. Agronomy, Facultad Ciencias Agrarias, Universidad Nacional de Rosario

Biography

During his Master’s Juan worked in the description and identification current finger millet accessions in the USDA germplasm collection for cultivation in the mid-west U.S. region and selection of parental candidates to develop new finger millet varieties. He also used the standardized BBCH chart as the baseline, to describe eight main stages of development and provided a simplified and user-friendly phenological growth staging scale for finger millet. In his doctoral studies, Juan focuses on identifying soybean germplasm with enhanced cold imbibition tolerance. Previous joining Iowa State University, Juan worked as a Soybean testing leader in Argentina. He participated as a committee member in the Corteva sponsored R. F. Baker Plant Breeding and as a secretary of the Agronomy Graduate Student Club at Iowa State. 

Current Project:  

Evaluation of a Soybean panel for Cold Imbibition and Germination

Soybean is a warm season crop with a temperature requirement of 10℃ to germinate. In the Mid-west, early planting dates are impaired by low temperatures. Advancing the planting date for soybeans in the Mid-west could potentially enhance yields by setting the critical period in more favorable environmental conditions. This project is screening a large panel of 350 soybean accessions, to identify genotypes showing a higher tolerance to cold imbibitional damage. The main objectives of the study are (1) to screen a large panel of maturity group 0 – III soybean for cold imbibition tolerance, (2) to test if the seed source has an effect on cold imbibition tolerance, and (3) to explore if seed size has an effect on cold imbibition tolerance.