Major Mereland Goodman

Major Mereland Goodman (September 13, 1938 – March 29, 2026) was an American maize geneticist and plant breeder at North Carolina State University. His work focused on maize genetic diversity, traditional variety classification, germplasm conservation, isozyme markers, and the use of tropical maize germplasm in temperate breeding programs. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986.

Early life and education Goodman was born in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 13, 1938. He grew up in Johnston, Iowa, where Pioneer Hi-Bred is based, and he worked on Pioneer summer field crews while in high school. William L. Brown, a maize breeder at Pioneer who later became the company's president and chief executive officer, encouraged Goodman to attend college and graduate school. His doctoral dissertation was supervised by Stanley Stephens; it was titled Classification, Correlation, and the Structure of Populations, developing the basis of his interests and expertise that he went on to be known for. Their work developed an approach for identifying maize lines and hybrids using isozyme electrophoresis, an approach later compared to DNA fingerprinting.

Honors and awards Goodman was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1986. He was elected a fellow of the Crop Science Society of America in 1986. In 1987, he received the O. Max Gardner Award from the University of North Carolina system and was appointed William Neal Reynolds Professor and Distinguished University Professor at North Carolina State University. He received the Frank N. Meyer Medal of the Crop Science Society of America in 1999 for work with plant genetic resources and the Holladay Medal for Excellence from North Carolina State University in 2003.