Shivcharan Singh Maan

Dr. SS Maan, a world renowned wheat geneticist, was born January 11, 1926 in Karnal, Punjab, India passed away on November 1, 2016 at home in Davis, California, while in the care of his wife Ranjit Kaur and daughter Ajit Kaur.

Following his BS degree in Botany from Punjab University in 1948, he studied at Kansas State University- Manhattan, obtaining an MS degree in 1958 and a PhD in 1961. While working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (1961-63), he made a seminal discovery of a genetic system for producing hybrid wheat. He would then devote his life to hybrid wheat research as a faculty member at North Dakota State University from 1964 until his retirement in 2000. Dr. Maan was a deep thinker and his discoveries and vision for hybrid wheat were ahead of their time, only now attracting huge interest from industry and academia. Currently, hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent working with materials that Dr. Maan developed to realize the dream of hybrid wheat. The genetic stocks and breeding lines that Dr. Maan and his collaborator Dr. Karl Lucken developed underpin hybrid wheat programs around the world, helping to increase wheat yield so that we may be able to feed 9.5 billion people by 2050. Dr. Maan trained many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and collaborated with many scientists around the world and published over 100 research papers. For his outstanding research achievements, Dr. Maan was honored as Fellow of the Crop and Agronomy Societies of America and received the Crop Science Research award in 1980. He was the first recipient of North Dakota State University’s Distinguished Professorship.

He is survived by his wife of 61 years, Ranjit Kaur Maan, his son Paul Singh Maan, his daughter, Dr. Ajit Kaur Maan, and his grandchildren Sohni Shivan Maan-Davie, and Simrin Ruchi Maan-Davie.

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