Dr. Tony J. Vyn is a recently retired professor from the Agronomy Department at Purdue University. Officially, his title is the “Wallace Emeritus Professor of Crop Sciences” because he held a chaired faculty position as the Henry A. Wallace Chair in Crop Sciences from 2018 to his retirement in December, 2023. Unofficially, he is a part-time cash crop farmer in Ontario and Indiana.  Tony grew up on a hog and cash crop farm near Ridgetown in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. He earned his degrees from the University of Guelph, (in Guelph, Ontario) after studying biology for 2 years at Trinity Christian College in Chicago.  He was a faculty member in the Crop Science Department at Guelph from 1987 until he joined the Agronomy Department faculty at Purdue University in 1998. During his 25-year career at Purdue, he and his research team members studied the physiology of crop (primarily corn) responses to tillage, rotations, nutrient rate/placement/timing, abiotic stress factors, and plant populations with modern and era hybrids.  He loved to find out when and how a plant change to management occurred so that he could better explain any final yield responses. Tony served as Co-Chair of the Indiana Crop Adviser Conference from 2003 to 2022. Dr. Vyn and his wife are blessed with 4 children who live with their respective families in the USA or Canada.

Sotirios Archontoulis is a professor of integrated cropping systems at the Department of Agronomy, Iowa State University. His research aims to predict impacts (e.g. climate change), explain causes (e.g. high/low yields), and design future strategies to improve crop productivity and environmental sustainability. His approach combines field experimentation with process-based simulation models to understand Genotype x Environment x Management interactions and enable prediction at scale.