Dr. Stephen Baenziger was awarded the ORCA in 2011. He was born in 1951 in Toronto, Canada. When he was an infant, his family immigrated to the US where he grew up in Des Plaines, Illinois. He earned a bachelor’s in biological chemistry magna cum laude from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Next, he earned a master’s and doctorate in plant breeding and genetics at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Over the next decade, he worked for the USDA at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center Maryland and then at Monsanto Corporation in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1986, he joined the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as an associate professor of agronomy (later agronomy and horticulture) and rose quickly through the ranks while studying the genetics and breeding of small grains such as wheat, barley, and triticale. He retired in 202 ...