Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
April 23, 2026
For more than 50 years, world-renowned maize geneticist and plant breeder Major Goodman called NC State University his professional home.
A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Goodman developed new tools for classifying maize — a species with immense genetic diversity — using statistical methods and some of the first molecular markers. He led international efforts to collect and preserve the maize gene pool from Latin America, both in seed banks and corn breeding lines, providing material for future hybrids and traits that could help protect corn from pests, drought and diseases.
Goodman, who died March 29 in Raleigh at age 87, will be remembered at a private family service. A gathering is being planned at NC State, where former colleagues recall Goodman’s generosity in sharing his time and expertise. Though Goodman taught a formal class only once during his career, he advised graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who went on to lead plant genetics and breeding programs for universities, government agencies and industry.
“Out in the field, that’s where he did his mentoring,” says Jim Holland, a Raleigh-based research geneticist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, as well as a former Ph.D. student of Goodman’s. “If you’d work with him, you could ask him questions and he’d explain.”
Corn Central
Goodman grew up in Johnston, Iowa, home to 500 people and the headquarters of the Pioneer Hi-Bred seed company. In high school he worked on the company’s summer field crews, hoeing and detasseling corn.
He met maize geneticist William L. Brown, a future president and CEO of Pioneer Hi-Bred, who found a lab job for Goodman and urged him to go to college and graduate school. Goodman, the youngest of seven, didn’t have tuition money, but a National Merit Scholarship allowed him to attend Iowa State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. Needing biology credits to graduate, he took a genetics class as an elective.
With a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation, Goodman attended NC State University, earning both a master’s and doctorate in genetics. Following that, he completed a two-year NSF postdoctoral appointment in Brazil, where he catalogued maize diversity in the region using multivariate statistics.
NC State brought him back as a visiting professor of statistics before he joined the department. During that time, he met his wife, Sheila. They married in 1970 and raised two sons from her first marriage, Sean and Scot.
Together, the couple made a special effort to welcome international students and their families, helping them get settled in Raleigh. One of the international students who benefited from the Goodmans’ hospitality was Jesús Sánchez González, who completed his Ph.D. with Goodman and became an expert on the diversity of maize and its wild relatives as a researcher with the University of Guadalajara in Mexico.
Major Goodman took time for a photo with a group of his former students at NC State during the American American Seed Trade Association conference in 2018.
Major Goodman with corn samples
University Archives Photograph Collection.
People (UA023.024), Special Collections Research Center at NC State University Libraries
Major Goodman asks a question during summer field work with the team in 2018,
From Statistician to Corn Breeder
Working with Charles Stuber, a USDA-ARS geneticist based in NC State’s Department of Genetics, Goodman developed a system for identifying corn lines and hybrids using isozymes, a forerunner of DNA fingerprinting. Their work yielded the largest array of genetic markers for a crop at the time, enabling in-depth research on maize evolution and genetics. Although maize, which originated in Mexico, contains vast genetic diversity, little of it makes its way into commercial varieties grown in the Corn Belt.
“One of the issues that Dr. Goodman recognized very early on is that corn breeding programs here in the U.S. have been very focused on improving yield,” says Rubén Rellán Álvarez, an NC State biochemistry professor who studies how corn adapts to environmental stress. “And breeders in the U.S. have been very successful at doing that, but that has come at a cost of a very narrow genetic diversity.”
That vulnerability allowed southern corn leaf blight to wipe out 15% of the U.S. crop in 1970. Goodman advocated for improving international and U.S. seed banks. Certain types of corn were missing, and stored seed was at risk of being lost due to seed bank neglect. Goodman called them “seed morgues,” adding, “That’s where seeds go to die and no one ever sees them again.”
“His bluntness worked,” Holland notes. Goodman went on to chair a USDA advisory committee, lead an international seed rescue effort and organize the Latin American Maize Project.
When the head of the crop sciences department asked Goodman to take over the corn breeding program in 1983, he plunged into applied science. Through painstaking work over the next 25 years, his team developed inbred lines, material breeders can use to make new hybrids. To date, the Germplasm Enhancement of Maize (GEM) project, a continuing effort involving NC State and USDA-ARS, has released more than 150 lines. Matt Krakowsky, with whom Goodman collaborated for many years, leads the GEM project. Many of its releases contain tropical germplasm to improve disease resistance and yields in the Southeast.
Uncomfortable in the Spotlight
Goodman earned a host of prestigious honors, including election to the National Academy of Sciences, the UNC System’s O. Max Gardner award for “contributions to mankind” and the Crop Science Society of America’s Frank N. Meyer Medal for his work with plant genetic resources.
In 2006, Goodman’s colleagues organized a symposium in Raleigh in his honor, featuring top maize scientists. Several said it was good that Major would soon be able to retire, Holland recalls. Goodman found the attendance “shocking” but fussed that the event was “plain embarrassing” in a magazine interview.
Though he periodically mentioned retirement, Goodman kept working until January 2022. He returned to the Central Crops Research Station for a few hours on July 4 of that year, right at the peak of corn pollination season — not for research, but simply to walk the corn nursery, visit colleagues and talk with the students.
Known as an ice cream lover of the highest order, Goodman sampled Fourth of July flavors courtesy of his former postdoc, soybean breeder Andrea Cardinal, as he made the rounds.
“For many of the students who recently joined our labs, that was the first time that they saw him,” says Rellán Álvarez. “And still to this day, students recount how special it was for them to spend some time there with Major.”
Major Goodman, center, enjoyed spending time with corn research leaders at NC State and their families.
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