Alumni award recipient Veronica Vallejo packs the room in her inaugural HRT/PSM Spring 2025 Seminar
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EmailVeronica Vallejo visited recently, to give the inaugural HRT/PSM Spring 2025 Seminar to a packed room, and to accept the outstanding alumni award from the Dept of Horticulture.
Veronica Vallejo visited recently, to give the inaugural HRT/PSM Spring 2025 Seminar to a packed room, and to accept the outstanding alumni award from the Dept of Horticulture.
Veronica completed her PhD in plant breeding with Jim Kelly in 2005 when it was the crop and soil dept. Upon completing a post-doc working with Ryan Warner in the horticulture department, she was recruited by PepsiCo, where she has been ever since. “When I walk through these halls, I am transported to my time here, when I could never have imagined that I would be where I am now!”
Originally from Argentina, Veronica was raised in Connecticut in a town a couple hours outside of NYC, where her family moved when she was four years old. For her bachelor’s degree in biology and genetics she attended Penn State —another land grant university—which, she learned, was founded the same year as MSU.
It was an easy leap to MSU for her PhD in plant breeding, working with Jim Kelly alongside Karen Cichy. “I had a great experience, intellectually stimulating and very socially active. There was always something going on,” Veronica says, recalling fundraising events, chili cook-offs and journal clubs. “It was a warm welcoming place.”
When she learned that Dr Jiang, then a new faculty member in Horticulture from the University of Georgia, would be working on transposable elements, “I knew I found a place to learn this new interesting new technology.” Bioinformatics was just getting started—a new and emerging as a field—and I jumped in! There were no classes to take –so I found workshops that were helpful, plus I had to learn programming and coding and the whole field was new so we learned as it developed.”
Veronica attributes her success to her willingness to take chances and face challenges. “Science can change quickly – a burst of energy emerges from significant ‘unlocks’ that happen in technology,” Veronica says. “When genome sequencing became possible at scale, it opened flood gates of opportunity to advance the science. I took full advantage of that.”
She was exhibiting her work at a poster session at a scientific conference when approached by a representative of PepsiCo, who recruited her for their emerging agricultural sciences program. “We started very small, and it was a great opportunity to build and grow with a program,” Veronica says. Based at the University of Minnesota, the strong connections to academic research made for a smooth transition. “We were right on campus, and we were able to hire some MSU grads from this department!”
There are some big differences between academia and the private sector, Veronica says. “Proprietary knowledge is an issue in certain situations, but the sheer size of PepsiCo offers innumerable opportunities for interactions with other scientists. At the same time, we are strongly partnered with academia—we publish papers together, we sit on grad student committees, we have a lot of involvement.”
While establishing a data science and trait discovery lab at PepsiCo, Veronica decided to earn an MBA at the University of Connecticut. Then a corporate re-org caused a directional shift. “It was scary to see programs cut and I struggled to understand value of science. Business school opened my eyes to the world of economics and finance and changed my message. Now I better understand the importance of identifying value in the research process. Science requires a pace, and it’s necessary to value discoveries that may take decades. Like plant breeding – which is a touchstone that many people can relate to. And it’s especially necessary to communicate that value.”
Now Director of PepsiCo’s Global Energy Beverage Platform, Veronica travels the world doing research on ingredients as well as public perception for new products. “Learning to code sent me on this trajectory from the most basic molecular research to launching global products.”
