Awards and Promotions - 2004

TAES Research Impact Award

(Pictured at Left: Dr. Klindt, Robert Miller, Karen Miller)

Award Description

This award is presented to an Experiment Station faculty or professional staff member whose efforts have had a profound effect on improving the efficiency, sustainability and/or economic viability of the food and fiber industry of rural areas of Tennessee.

Citation

Dr. Robert Miller, the 2004 award winner is a professor and researcher in the plant sciences department, and has been the leader of the Experiment Station’s tobacco breeding program since he came to UT in 1982.

Miller’s research efforts have directly benefitted tobacco producers here in Tennessee, throughout the southeast, and the world.

Miller is considered a world leader in the development of disease tolerant tobacco cultivars. More than a decade ago, he developed TN-90, a burley cultivar that was resistant to no less than seven different diseases. Today it is the most widely-grown burley cultivar on the planet.

The University of Tennessee’s tobacco breeding program was merged with the University of Kentucky five years ago, and now the Kentucky-Tennessee Tobacco Improvement Initiative is under the outstanding leadership of Miller.

Based on average yields and prices for burley tobacco, sales figures for the varieties produced by this remarkable scientist last year exceeded $1 billion, and some of the cultivars developed by Miller are expected to reduce the negative health related consequences of tobacco use.