Arcadia Biosciences, Inc. (Nasdaq: RKDA), a food ingredient company, announced that Randy Shultz, Ph.D. has joined the company’s leadership team as head of research and development.

Shultz has nearly 20 years of experience in plant science and agricultural biotechnology. The former global crop lead at Inari Agriculture, he also served there as the director of R&D and senior director of R&D strategy. Shultz was the first key scientific hire at Inari and played an instrumental role in building a scalable R&D platform and developing a foundational intellectual property estate. Before Inari, Shultz spent several years leading various scientific production teams at Monsanto (now Bayer Crop Science), including their Genome Editing Platform team.

“Throughout his career, Randy has established a reputation as a keen R&D strategist, driving products through the pipeline from invention through commercial planning,” said Raj Ketkar, Arcadia’s president and CEO. “With his deep expertise in gene editing and new plant breeding technologies, he will be exploring new partnerships and licensing opportunities to expand our platform of tools to improve crops. We are thrilled to have a science leader of Randy’s caliber as we build our capabilities in cannabis and advance future innovations in our GoodWheat portfolio of novel wheat attributes.”

“Arcadia is an innovative company with a strong technology foundation and rich pipeline of novel products,” said Shultz. “I look forward to working with Arcadia’s team of world-class scientists as we build the next generation of products, bringing value to growers and downstream partners.”

Shultz received his Ph.D. in functional genomics from North Carolina State University and his B.S. degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has authored over a dozen patents and publications.