Nevin Young is an emeritus professor who retired as an Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota with joint appointments in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Department of Plant Biology. Previously, Dr. Young was also director of the Plant Molecular Genetics Institute at Minnesota. He received his B.A. at Indiana University in 1977 and Ph.D. at Yale University in 1984 working with Arthur Galston, followed by a NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University working with Milt Zaitlin and Steve Tanksley. He is author or co-author of more than 340 scientific publications, including 133 refereed publications and 20 book chapters with an overall h-index score of 76. His research highlights include the first mapping of plant disease resistance using DNA markers, the first comparative genetic mapping of plant developmental genes, and the first bioinformatic analysis of plant disease resistance genes. In 2003, Dr. Young became principal investigator on the NSF initiative to sequence the genome of the model legume, Medicago truncatula, which was published in Nature magazine in 2011. Dr. Young was later lead PI on a second NSF project to create a Hapmap platform for genome-wide association studies in Medicago. Dr. Young has served on the scientific advisory board for the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR), the editorial boards of Molecular Breeding, Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions, and G3: Genes, Genomes and Genetics and multiple NSF, USDA and ARS grant review panels and UN research coordination groups. Previously, he served as co-chair of the International Medicago truncatula Genome Sequencing Initiative and was a member of the scientific advisory committee for the European Union Grain Legumes Integrated Programme and the U.S. Legume Information System.