Rate My Professor Natalia De Leon Gatti

Natalia de Leon Gatti is a Professor in the Department of Plant and Agroecosystem Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in maize breeding and genetics. She chairs the Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics Program and leads the Corn Breeding project. Her research focuses on genotype-by-environment interactions, phenotypic plasticity, genomic prediction, heterosis, and traits enhancing grain yield, silage quality, and biofuel production. She integrates phenotypic, genotypic, and expression data to advance plant breeding and quantitative genetics, particularly for biomass increase and cell wall composition in maize. De Leon Gatti earned a B.S. in Agronomy from the Argentinean Catholic University in 1997, an M.S. in Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2000, and a Ph.D. in the same field from the same institution in 2002. Her professional career includes a postdoctoral fellowship in Crop and Soil Sciences at Michigan State University (2003-2004), roles as corn breeder and research station manager at Golden Harvest and Syngenta Seeds (2004-2006), and faculty appointments at UW-Madison: Assistant Professor (2006-2013), Associate Professor (2013-2017), and Professor since 2017, with a 75% research and 25% teaching assignment.

De Leon Gatti has garnered major awards, including the Crop Science Society of America Fellow (2020), CSSA Presidential Award (2023), H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellow (2018/19), National Council of Commercial Plant Breeders Public Plant Breeder Award (2017), UW Vilas Associate (2014/15), and DuPont Young Professor Award (2011/13). Her influential publications encompass data-driven studies on environmental influences on maize yield plasticity (One Earth, submitted), climatic information for genomic prediction in the Genomes to Fields project (Frontiers in Genetics, submitted), introgression-by-environment interactions (Theoretical and Applied Genetics, 2020), single-parent expression in maize hybrids (The Plant Journal, 2019), small RNA variation in maize (Plant Physiology, 2020), and Maize Genomes to Fields datasets (BMC Research Notes, 2020). She contributes to large-scale initiatives like Genomes to Fields, providing critical datasets for maize research, and has served on university committees including equity and diversity, faculty senate, and graduate education searches, impacting the field of plant sciences through training future breeders and advancing sustainable agriculture.