Bruce Bugbee

Dr. Bugbee’s career has been guided by the idea that teaching is the highest form of understanding. Over a 34 year career at Utah State University, he has mentored 33 graduate students and taught over a thousand undergraduate students. USU honored him with the Graduate Mentor of the Year award in 2001.
He is internationally known for his research with NASA. In 2006 he and his students released a super-dwarf variety of wheat that has been used in numerous studies on the Space Station. He is currently funded by NASA to study the use of fiber optics for growing plants in space. The State of Utah awarded him the Governor’s Medal for Science and Technology in 2011.
He and his students have published over 100 journal articles and book chapters. This scholarship has resulted in invitations to speak at 21 universities and in 8 countries. In 2013, he gave a TEDx talk entitled “Turning water into food.”