Geoffrey is an Associate Professor of Crop Quantitative Genomics at Colorado State University. As Trait Discovery lead for ILCI, he helps partners achieve their goals on discovery and delivery of useful new traits. He provides training and tools that empower partners with an applied scientific method.

Geoffrey was trained as an evolutionary genome biologist at University of Ottawa (B.Sc., Biology) and University of Chicago (Ph.D., Ecology & Evolution). He turned his focus to crop genomics during his postdoctoral research, first to the emerging bioenergy crop switchgrass at University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, then to sorghum, starting as a research assistant professor at University of South Carolina. Prior to joining the faculty at Colorado State, he was a faculty member at Kansas State University, where he led the sorghum genetics program and delivered molecular breeding technology for several adaptive traits to seed companies and public breeders in the US and Africa.

The Morris lab at Colorado State develops and implements new approaches to understand and improve crop adaptation. Their mission is to develop knowledge and technology that accelerate the development of climate-resilient crops. They map genes that underlie climate adaptation and develop new approaches to understand and predict adaptation. Sorghum – a global food, forage, and feed crop – is the lab’s focal system. They work directly with breeding programs in developing countries (Senegal, Niger, Haiti, and others) and in the US (Kansas, Texas, South Carolina) to facilitate development of better-adapted varieties of sorghum.