Rex Bernardo has been on the faculty at the University of Minnesota since 2000. He obtained a B.S. degree in agriculture, majoring in plant breeding, at the Visayas State College of Agriculture in the Philippines in 1984. He graduated summa cum laude and worked in a national breeding program for sweet potato. In 1988 he obtained a Ph.D. degree in plant breeding at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to coming to Minnesota, Rex was a research scientist at Limagrain Genetics, Champaign, Illinois for 9 years and a faculty member at Purdue University for 3 years. He has been a visiting scientist at INRA in Gif-sur-Yvette, France; Limagrain Europe in Riom, France; Wageningen University in the Netherlands; CIRAD in Montpellier, France; BOKU University near Vienna, Austria; University of Bologna in Italy; and University of Milan in Italy.

Rex has served as an associate editor and a technical editor of Crop Science and as an editor of Theoretical and Applied Genetics. His awards include the Young Crop Scientist Award from the Crop Science Society of America (CSSA) in 1999; Fellow of CSSA in 2005; Fellow of the American Society of Agronomy in 2005; Plant Breeding Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding (NAPB) in 2015; Crop Science Research Award from CSSA in 2019; Distinguished University Teaching Professor from the University of Minnesota in 2024; and Lifetime Achievement Award from NAPB in 2024.

Rex’s top 5 strengths from StengthsFinders are Strategic, Belief, Learner, Responsibility, and Ideation. In his leisure time, Rex enjoys playing the acoustic guitar, taking his wife, Chona, on dates (usually a restaurant, swing dancing, or tandem biking), and hanging out with their six adult F1 progeny and four F2 progeny.