Michael Tross

Michael Tross is graduate student on the Integrated Plant Biology track of the Complex Biosystems graduate program at UNL. He joined the lab in the summer of 2020 after rotating in the lab in his first year. He received his Bachelors from Doane University in 2019, where he worked with Tessa Durham Brooks phenotyping maize plants. He hails from the town of Sandy Point, located on the small island of St. Kitts in the Caribbean. He has previously worked as both a lab technician and a high school teacher.

Google Scholar Profile

TA: Laboratory Section of LIFE 120 – Fundamentals of Biology

In the News

July 01, 2025 Plants People Planet cover feature
Michael Tross and a paper led by Nikee Shrestha are featured on the cover of Plants, People, Planet. Read the cover write-up, which links to the paper.
June 08, 2025 Corteva genotyping tour and lab visit
Michael Tross, who earned his PhD in Plant Science in our lab and now works as an AI data scientist at Corteva, arranged for nearly the entire lab to drive from Lincoln to Johnston to talk science with Corteva researchers and tour their impressive high-throughput genotyping facilities.
May 10, 2024 Michael Tross profiled on AI for agriculture
Midwest Messenger highlighted Michael Tross’s work on AI for agriculture.
March 22, 2024 Michael Tross defends PhD
Congratulations to Dr. Michael Tross on defending his PhD thesis.

Recent Publications

Tross MC, Duggan G, Shrestha N, Schnable JC (2024) Models trained to predict differential expression across plant organs identify distal and proximal regulatory regions. doi: 10.1101/2024.06.04.597477 Preprint
Powadi A, Jubery T, Tross M, Shrestha N, Coffey L, Schnable JC, Schnable PS, Ganapathysubramanian B (2025) Enhancing yield prediction from plot-level satellite imagery through genotype and environment feature disentanglement. Frontiers in Plant Science doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1617831
Istipliler D, Tross MC, Bouwens B, Jin H, Yufeng Ge, Yang J, Mural RV, Schnable JC (2025) Heritability, heterosis, and hybrid/inbred classification ability of maize leaf hyperspectral signals under changing soil nitrogen. Crop Science doi: 10.1002/csc2.70073
Shrestha N, Mangal H, Torres-Rodriguez JV, Tross MC, Lopez-Corona L, Linders K, Sun G, Mural RV, Schnable JC (2025) Off-the-shelf image analysis models outperform human visual assessment in identifying genes controlling seed color variation in sorghum. The Plant Phenome Journal doi: 10.1002/ppj2.70013 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2024.07.22.604683
Powadi A, Jubery TZ, Tross M, Schnable JC, Ganapathysubramanian B (2024) Disentangling genotype and environment specific latent features for improved trait prediction using a compositional autoencoder. Frontiers in Plant Science doi: 10.3389/fpls.2024.1476070
Ostermann I, Benes B, Gaillard M, Li B, Davis J, Grove RJ, Shrestha N, Tross MC, Schnable JC (2024) Sorghum segmentation and leaf counting using an in silico trained deep neural model. The Plant Phenome Journal doi: 10.1002/ppj2.70002
Jin H, Tross MC, Tan R, Newton L, Mural RV, Yang J, Thompson AM, Schnable JC (2024) Imitating the "breeder’s eye": predicting grain yield from measurements of non-yield traits. The Plant Phenome Journal doi: 10.1002/ppj2.20102 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2023.11.29.568906
Tross MC, Grzybowski M, Jubery TZ, Grove RJ, Nishimwe AV, Torres-Rodriguez JV, Sun G, Ganapathysubramanian B, Ge Y, Schnable JC (2024) Data driven discovery and quantification of hyperspectral leaf reflectance phenotypes across a maize diversity panel. The Plant Phenome Journal doi: 10.1002/ppj2.20106 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2023.12.15.571950
Gaillard M, Benes B, Tross MC, Schnable JC (2023) Multi-view triangulation without correspondences. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture doi: 10.1016/j.compag.2023.107688
Mural RV, Sun G, Grzybowski M, Tross MC, Jin H, Smith C, Newton L, Andorf CM, Woodhouse MR, Thompson AM, Sigmon B, Schnable JC (2022) Association mapping across a multitude of traits collected in diverse environments identifies pleiotropic loci in maize. Gigascience doi: 10.1093/gigascience/giac080 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2022.02.25.480753
Tross MC, Gaillard M, Zweiner M, Miao C, Grove RJ, Li B, Benes B, Schnable JC (2021) 3D reconstruction identifies loci linked to variation in angle of individual sorghum leaves. PeerJ doi: 10.7717/peerj.12628 bioRxiv doi: 10.1101/2021.06.15.448566