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Carrie Miranda has joined North Dakota State University as an assistant professor and project leader for the soybean breeding program.

In addition, Miranda will teach NDSU’s Department of Plant Sciences applied plant breeding and research methods class in the fall of 2021.

The goals of her soybean breeding program at NDSU are to produce high-yield varieties while discovering new genetic mechanisms for useful traits to ensure North Dakota farmers have access to superior soybean varieties.

“We look forward to Dr. Miranda working with scientists, producers and growers with the common interest of developing and improving soybean varieties,” says Richard Horsley, NDSU Department of Plant Sciences head.

Miranda is originally from Cleveland, Ohio, where she completed her bachelor’s degree in biology at Cleveland State University. 

After volunteering for AmeriCorps in Arizona and teaching English in Seoul, South Korea, she returned to the U.S. to complete her master’s degree in molecular biology at San Diego State University. 

Uniting her passion for food security and molecular biology, and incorporating a new skill of plant breeding, she completed her Ph.D. at the University of Missouri. 

During that time, she was awarded a Borlaug Research Fellowship Grant. With funding from the Soybean Innovation Lab and the University of Missouri, she conducted field trials in northern Ghana to determine the genetic mechanisms controlling maturity in tropical soybeans. 

Following graduation, she worked as a pea breeder for Puris Foods in Oskaloosa, Iowa, before returning to the University of Missouri as a U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service postdoctoral fellow focused on using bioinformatic tools to identify and validate candidate genes.