My name is Owen Hudson, I’m currently a PhD candidate in Plant Pathology at the University of Florida and I expect to complete my degree in December 2024. In my current position at the University of Florida, I study Fusarium ear rot of maize, specifically genomic methods to improve disease resistance breeding, identification of disease-related genes, and high throughput plant phenotyping. While my degree will be in plant pathology, my activities have been more focused on plant breeding and bioinformatics, specifically quantitative genetics, comparative genomics, and genomic selection models. I now employ Linux/Bash, R, and Python regularly in my research and analysis, and I have included machine learning and predictive proteomics in my research. In my PhD, I build a machine to image maize ears and developed several machine learning classification models for disease prediction estimates on those images. I've also built machine learning models with the USDA-ARS to identify the most influential protein domains in specific microbial groups to predict their life habit (pathogenic, saprophytic, etc.) and then use the model to predict unknown fungi. I also was able to modify the model for use in my own dataset and improve my comparative genomic methods.