Dec. 15, 2025
Photo by Roger Meissen
Ron Mittler has been selected as the University of Missouri’s 2026 recipient of the SEC Faculty Achievement Award. The purpose of this award is to honor individuals with outstanding records in both teaching and research while serving as role models for junior faculty and students. Mittler is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Plant Science and Technology in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources.
Mittler’s application will now move forward to the SEC and compete against each campus winner for the SEC Professor of the Year, announced in late spring and honored during the annual SEC Awards Celebration in Destin, Florida.
In addition, he will be recognized along with other Mizzou faculty award recipients at a reception on May 5, 2026, during Faculty Excellence Week.
“I am honored to be recognized by this award, and I feel privileged to be part of Mizzou,” Mittler said. “To me, training the new generation of scientists, thinkers and leaders, as well as contributing to the improvement of our society at the local and global levels, are the highest aspirations. Thank you.”
Mittler was named a Curators’ Distinguished Professor in 2022; in 2024, he was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and received the Frederick B. Mumford Award for Distinguished Faculty, CAFNR’s highest honor.
He is also part of the Bond Life Sciences Center, Interdisciplinary Plant Group and the School of Medicine’s Department of Surgery. Mittler is well-known in the scientific community for his work on stress combination in plants and reactive oxygen species (ROS) signaling, as well as for his discoveries of the ROS wave, the multifactorial stress combination principle, and differential transpiration. He joined the University of Missouri in 2018.
