Horticulture Innovators

Stephan von Rundstedt is the co-founder of RoBo®Tec PTC GmbH and brings over 25 years of experience across the production and services industries. His expertise lies in business strategy and the development of innovative deep-tech solutions to sustainably transform agricultural production.With RoBo®Cut, a robot for fully autonomous in-vitro plant propagation, he and his wife and business partner, Friederike von Rundstedt, have taken steps to address our most pressing global challenges in environmental protection and food security.Website: https://www.robotec-ptc.com/en/

Brad Abrameit is a 1994 and 1996 graduate of Texas A&M University with a B.S. and M.S. in Horticulture. He is the President at Magnolia Gardens Nursery. Brad leads all functions of the container(165 acres) and tissue culture division (20 acres), both strategically and tactically. He is charged with stabilizing, professionalizing, and preparing the business for growth. He is an executive leader bringing 27+ years of experience in the horticulture industry to the forefront, driving strategic initiatives and have propelled the company to consistent growth. A proven track record of successful launches and market expansion, recognized for fostering a collaborative environment that empowers teams to innovate and deliver exceptional results.Magnolia Gardens: https://magnoliagardens.com/

Jim Antwerp is a 1990 graduate of Texas A& M University with a B.S. in Horticulture with a study emphasis in horticulture of Wholesale Nursery Management and Production and a study emphasis outside horticulture in Business. Having a horticulture career that began with home gardening in youth, working later as nursery labor and subsequently rising in Nursery Management, he has served as Vice President at Flower wood Nursery Inc and currently at Greenleaf Nursery which are two largewoody ornamental nursery operations. Both of these companies are family owned and have celebrated their 75th anniversary of operation and counting.

Ockert Greyvenstein joined Ball Horticultural Company, in 2014 as plant breeder with PanAmericanSeed. A transplant from South Africa, he came to the US for graduate school, first earning his master's at Cornell, followed by a Ph.D. in plant breeding from Texas A&M University in 2013. Currently, he is the Regional Breeding Director based in Elburn, IL, overseeing breeding operations in Illinois and Costa Rica with projects ranging from Angelonia to Zebra-striped tomatoes. During his time with Ball he bred several crops including Viola, Vinca, Cuphea, cut-flower Delphinium, and a few others. His expertise is in breeding, and applied research. Ball Horticulture: https://www.ballhort.com/

Prof. Arun Sharma received his Ph.D. in Life Sciences from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India, in 1987 after carrying out work on the regulation of nitrate assimilation by phytochrome in the laboratory of Prof. Sudhir Sopory. He performed post-doctoral work with Dr. G. Kumar at the School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, in 1998 and at Wayne State University, Detroit, from 1989 to 1991, in the area of DNA-protein interaction. He did post-doctoral work with Prof. Sudhir Sopory at JNU, New Delhi, from 1991-94 and with Professor Akhilesh Tyagi at University of Delhi, South Campus (UDSC) from 1995-1997 in the area of signal transduction during the regulation of genes in plants. He became Assistant Professor at the Department of Plant Molecular Biology, UDSC in 1997, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2002 and Professor in 2010. At UDSC, he worked from 1997 to 2023 in the area of structural and functional genomics of tomato and other areas. The work included sequencing a part of chromosome 5 as a member of the International Tomato Genome Consortium and the development of tomato plants with improved nutritional quality and longer shelf life. The other areas of research had been the role of methylated DNA-binding proteins in gene silencing in Arabidopsis and tomato, and the development of an edible vaccine against cholera. Prof. Sharma was nominated as a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India, in 2012.