Vegetable and Fruit Improvement Center

Kevin Crosby received his B.S. in Horticulture from Texas A&M University in 1991. He received a M.S. in Horticulture/Plant Breeding from the University of Hawaii in 1993. He then returned to complete his PhD in Plant Breeding at Texas A&M in 1999. From 1999-2008 Dr. Crosby worked as a Plant Breeder at Texas AgriLife Research Center at Weslaco.  There he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2005.  He then accepted a tenure track position in plant breeding and genetics in the Department of Horticultural Sciences at TAMU in late 2008.

Dr. Crosby’s area of research is plant breeding and genetics of vegetable crops. He has worked on melon, pepper, tomato, onion and carrot. The main emphasis of his research has been the elucidation of genetic mechanisms for stress tolerance and enhanced nutritional quality. Dr. Crosby has discovered several novel traits and studied their inheritance in both melon and pepper. These range from root physiology and vigor to virus and insect resistance.  His program also has developed a genetic linkage map of melon with DNA markers linked to several key traits.   The development of thousands of novel families for genetic studies has also produced elite breeding lines for commercial seed companies and 9 cultivar releases.  In addition, Dr. Crosby has developed unique, high antioxidant pepper lines with flavonoid and ascorbic acid levels more than 400% higher than commercial cultivars.

“The sustainability of high quality vegetable production will depend on the continued efforts to exploit novel genetic traits for enhanced stress tolerance. Interdisciplinary collaborations between plant breeders, physiologists and pathologists will allow us to unravel the interactions between genetic and environmental factors, which impact crucial quality traits. ”