2018 Borlaug Field Award Ceremony
Matthew Rouse
Matthew Rouse, a plant pathologist at the Cereal Disease Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS), received the 2018 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application, Endowed by the Rockefeller Foundation. He is recognized for his essential leadership efforts to contain and reduce the impact of Ug99, a devastating new race of the stem rust pathogen that poses a serious threat to the world’s wheat crops and global food security.
Dr. Rouse developed his passion for agriculture while working part-time on a farm during his graduate studies at Kansas State University (KSU). While learning to raise pigs and grow crops, including corn, soybeans, and wheat, Dr. Rouse became aware of the rust disease, the damage it causes each season and the importance of breeding resistant wheat varieties. After earning his master’s degree at KSU, Dr. Rouse enrolled as a Ph.D. student in plant pathology at the University of Minnesota like Dr. Norman Borlaug before him, and began working on wheat stem rust at the ARS Cereal Disease Laboratory. In 2007, within the first month of his Ph.D. studies, he traveled to Kenya and saw firsthand the devastating effects of stem rust on the yields of poor subsistence farmers who depend on wheat for their food and livelihoods.