Dr. McClung recently retired from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, where she served as Center Director of the Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center in Stuttgart, Arkansas. She holds degrees in agronomy and plant breeding from Texas A&M University and North Dakota State University. Her career includes 32 years as a rice geneticist and breeder with USDA-ARS, following nine years in private industry working in corn breeding.
Over the course of her career, she developed more than 30 rice cultivars, germplasm lines, and diversity panels that have been grown commercially and widely used as breeding parents and research materials. Her long-grain cultivars—recognized for superior milling quality, strong ratoon potential, disease resistance, and distinctive processing and nutritional traits—have been cultivated across the southern United States as well as in Brazil and Spain.
Dr. McClung has collaborated extensively across disciplines and authored more than 160 publications on topics including climate change, methane emissions, water-saving production systems, organic rice production, trait-linked molecular markers, high-throughput phenotyping methods, and the genetics underlying nutritional, sensory, and cooking properties.