Nevin Young is an emeritus professor and former Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota with joint appointments in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Department of Plant Biology. Dr. Young received his B.A. at Indiana University in 1977 and Ph.D. at Yale University in 1984, followed by a NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University. He is author or co-author of more than 340 scientific publications, including 133 refereed publications and 20 book chapters. Dr. Young was principal investigator of the NSF initiative to sequence the genome of the model legume, Medicago truncatula, published in Nature magazine in 2011, as well as the more recent NSF project to create a genome-wide association mapping "Hapmap" platform for Medicago.