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Breaking News! Dr. Hao-Xun Chang, the new faculty in our department being selected as 2019 Yushan Young Scholar by the Ministry of Education

2019-10-14 11:00:00

The Ministry of Education established the Yushan (Young) Scholar Award to assist national universities recruiting international outstanding scholars to Taiwan, and the new faculty in our department, Dr. Hao-Xun Chang, has been awarded with the Yushan Young Scholar Award in acknowledge of his research proposal in enhancing disease resistance of edamame/vegetable soybean in Taiwan. Dr. Chang received his Ph.D. in crop sciences at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2016, and proceeded his postdoc careers at UIUC and Michigan State University before becoming a faculty in our department, starting on August 1st in 2019. Dr. Chang has published 14 articles in SCI journals with 10 being the first author, and his research experience include soybean resistance screening and genome-wide association study, genomics and virulence mechanisms of plant pathogenic fungi, metagenome-wide association study and machine learning prediction in microbiome, and disease resistance of other legume crops.

Dr. Chang's future research will focus on the genetics and disease resistance of edamame and legume crops in Taiwan. Specifically, edamame has become one of the most important exporting agricultural products in Taiwan and its annual value in the past five year has reached over 60 million USD. Dr. Chang will study endemic diseases and pathogens of edamame, and concentrate on the virulence mechanisms and the precise applications of fungicide for root rotting pathogens such as Fusarium species and pod rotting pathogens such as Colletotrichum species. In addition, Dr. Chang will collect edamame germplasms in Taiwan and import important germplasms from the USA to maintain a collection with diverse genetic resource. He will also screen disease resistance in this collection for important or emerging diseases in Taiwan to provide a scholastic foundation for resistance breeding.

We heartily welcome Dr. Chang and wish his future career to bring up the application and reputation of researches in agriculture and plant pathology for Taiwan!

Asst. Prof. Hao-Xun Chang's Laboratory Introduction