Curt Hill

Senior Staff Scientist

Curt Hill leads Agricen Sciences’ plant-based testing group, whose role is to evaluate promising candidate technologies in crop plant assays to support technology commercialization decisions.

Curt is an expert in soybean and brassica crop genetics, especially in improving yield by identifying and utilizing the genes associated with disease and pest resistance. He was trained in plant pathology and plant breeding at the Universities of Wisconsin and Minnesota and has acquired an impressive breadth and depth of experiences in the design and execution of plant-based testing systems over the course of his career. While a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, he developed stocks of rapid-cycling brassicas, now known as Wisconsin Fast Plants®, which are used worldwide to demonstrate principles of plant biology and genetics in classrooms. Curt later joined the nascent plant biotechnology industry in Canada and the USA, and participated in the development and commercialization of the first transgenic canola cultivars.

Before joining Agricen Sciences, Curt was a principal research specialist at the University of Illinois, and identified and mapped the first known soybean aphid resistance genes in soybean. Mr. Hill holds an MS in plant pathology.