A reception welcoming Luis Rafael Herrera-Estrella, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the newest faculty member of Texas Tech's Department of Plant and Soil Science, will be held at 3 p.m. on Wednesday (Aug. 22) in the Student Union Building's Red Raider Ballroom.

Herrera-Estrella comes to the university after serving as the director and full professor of the National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity (LANGEBIO) in Guanajuato, Mexico. He is widely regarded as one of the world's top researchers in the field of plant molecular biology.

Herrera-Estrella is known and respected worldwide for his work in cotton genomics, having earned the distinction in 2015 as one of the 100 most influential people in biotechnology by Scientific American magazine. A holder of 15 patents, he has published more than 180 research papers and 47 book chapters and other reviews and has delivered more than 200 presentations on his work.

His arrival at Texas Tech was facilitated thanks to a $5 million grant Texas Tech received from the State of Texas Governor's University Research Initiative (GURI), which was created in 2015 by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's Office of Economic Development & Tourism and the state legislature to encourage universities to bring the world's top researchers in the areas of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM) to Texas. Texas Tech matched the GURI grant to bring Herrera-Estrella to Lubbock.

CONTACT: William Brown, Dean, College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, Texas Tech University at (806) 742-2808 or william.f.brown@ttu.edu

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