2026 Plenary Speakers
Gerald Tuskan
Feedstock to Fuel: Beyond the Populus Reference Genome
Gerald A. Tuskan is a Corporate Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Director/CEO of the Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI), a DOE Bioenergy Research Center comprising ~265 researchers across 17 partner institutions. His leadership and research focus on creating process-advantaged lignocellulosic biomass for biological and chemical conversion, including pathways relevant to sustainable aviation fuel. He has made foundational contributions to woody plant genomics and gene-to-phenotype discovery, including creating large-scale genome-wide association resources in woody plants and directing the multi-national effort to sequence, assemble, and annotate the Populus genome—one of the earliest demonstrations of plant shotgun sequencing/assembly and chromosome-scale genome construction approaches. Across his career, he has secured and led major federal research programs (DOE/NSF/USDA) totaling >$600M, authored hundreds of peer-reviewed publications, and holds 16 U.S. patents with multiple commercial licensing agreements.
Nancy Sonti
Phytotechnologies in Urban Communities: Case Studies from Baltimore and Detroit
Nancy Sonti is a Research Ecologist with the US Forest Service Northern Research Station. She is based at the Baltimore Field Station, where she works as an interdisciplinary researcher studying urban social-ecological systems. Nancy works to build collaboration between academics, community groups, and government agencies through the Baltimore Urban Waters Federal Partnership, the Chesapeake Bay Program Forestry Workgroup, and other networks from local to national scales. She also currently serves on the International Society of Arboriculture's Nominations and Elections Committee. Her research interests include urban tree physiology across different site types from forested natural areas to street tree pits; processes of forest restoration and regeneration in urban areas; urban forest inventory and analysis (Urban FIA); and motivations for community engagement with urban green spaces. Nancy has a Bachelor’s Degree in History from Stanford University, a Master’s in Conservation Biology from Columbia University, and a PhD in Plant Science from the University of Maryland, College Park.