Artificial intelligence is opening new possibilities for crop breeding. In this Scientific Café, Dr. Carlos Messina will present two complementary approaches: symbolic AI, which incorporates knowledge from crop physiology and crop simulation models, and subsymbolic AI, which learns from data. He will show how integrating the two enables progress toward predictive breeding that can anticipate how varieties will perform in changing environments.

• Carlos Messina earned his PhD at the University of Florida, where he is now a Professor in the Horticultural Sciences Department and Director of the UF/IFAS Crop Transformation Center. Before that, he built an extensive career in industry, first at Pioneer/DuPont and later as a Distinguished Fellow at Corteva Agriscience. There, he helped develop drought-tolerant maize hybrids, now planted on millions of hectares in the United States and Brazil, and led the Circular Agriculture initiative. His research seeks to integrate plant breeding with artificial intelligence, combining crop physiology, simulation models, statistical learning and complex systems theory to predict crop performance in changing environments. The goal is to develop varieties and production systems that regenerate the environment, improve nutrition and adapt to climate change. He is internationally recognized for his contributions to integrating crop models with genomic prediction.

Date and time: Thursday, November 19, 2026, at 2:00 pm (Washington, D.C. time)

Register for free here.