AWC agriculture director joins Oxford journal editorial board

Arizona Western College’s agriculture director has landed a role that could carry Yuma County’s name far beyond the desert farm fields, joining the editorial board of an Oxford University Press journal focused on computational plant science.

Dr. Hikmet Budak was announced April 16, 2026, as an editor for in silico Plants, where he will oversee the Genetics and Genomics section. Arizona Western College said the job includes managing peer review and making final publication decisions, giving Budak real influence over which studies shape the journal’s scientific direction.

That matters in Yuma County because the region’s agriculture depends on solving exactly the kind of problems Budak studies: how plants respond to heat, drought, pests and other stresses, and how breeders can make crops perform better with less water and fewer inputs. His work focuses on genetics and genomics to improve abiotic and biotic stress tolerance in cereals, a field that connects directly to the production challenges growers face in Arizona’s lower Colorado River Valley.

in silico Plants launched in April 2019 as an open-access, peer-reviewed international journal published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Annals of Botany Company. The journal covers plant modelling and research at the intersection of mathematics, computer science, omics, plant biology, crop science, ecology and forestry, a scope that reflects how agriculture is increasingly being driven by data as much as by dirt and irrigation.

Oxford Academic lists Budak as director of agriculture programs at Arizona Western College in Yuma and as an adjunct professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The journal also lists editors and board members including Professor Stephen Long, Rachel Shekar, Deborah Dixon and Christine Raines, placing Budak alongside researchers with international reach.

For AWC, the appointment does more than honor one faculty leader. The college said it increases visibility for its agriculture program, a boost that could help strengthen research partnerships, student training and workforce development in a county where agriculture is not just an industry but a daily economic anchor. In a region where water efficiency, crop resilience and productivity carry direct consequences for jobs and food supply, Budak’s new role ties Yuma more tightly to the global conversation on how the next generation of crops will be designed, tested and grown.