Rodolfo is a Research Support Specialist in the Cornell Soil Health Laboratory. His primary role is to curate and quality-control all data generated by the laboratory’s various tests, ensuring that a high-quality product is delivered to each client, including farmers, extension agents, academics, and individuals interested in the health status of their soils.
Rodolfo holds a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM-Xochimilco) in Mexico and a Ph.D. in Plant Biology from Washington University in St. Louis. His doctoral research focused on the hormonal regulation of germination in grains, with important implications in processes such as preharvest sprouting and the malting process in beer production. After a short tenure at a start-up company in St. Louis MO, where he worked on strategies to control plant pathogenic nematodes, he moved to North Carolina to continue his research on hormonal regulation of plant development at Duke University, where he remained as a research scientist for 15 years.
Prior to joining the Cornell Soil Health Lab, Rodolfo conducted research at the USDA-ARS in Raleigh. Initially, he studied the effect of air pollution and heat stress on soybean physiology and yield. Afterward, he joined the USDA Soil Ecology Lab where he studied the influence of land use and agriculture practices — broadly categorized into conventional-till, no-till, grassland and woodland — on soil health. He also assisted in conducting research on how conservation agricultural management on farms in the southeastern US affects soil physical, chemical, and biological properties to assess soil health and soil carbon storage potential.
Selected Publications:
- Franzluebbers, Alan J., Bhupinder S. Farmaha, Rodolfo Zentella, and Arjun Kafle. "Soil‐profile fertility is altered by soil texture and land use across physiographic regions in the southeastern United States." Agronomy Journal 117, no. 2 (2025): e70041.
- Franzluebbers, Alan J., Rodolfo Zentella, and Arjun Kafle. "Soil health under forage and grazing lands in the humid United States." CABI Reviews 19, no. 1 (2024).
- Zentella, Rodolfo, Kent O. Burkey, and Ripley H. Tisdale. "Impact of tropospheric ozone on root proteomes of two soybean genotypes with contrasting sensitivity to ozone." Environmental and Experimental Botany 208 (2023): 105269.
- Tisdale, Ripley H., Rodolfo Zentella, and Kent O. Burkey. "Impact of elevated ozone on yield and carbon-nitrogen content in soybean cultivar ‘Jake’." Plant Science 306 (2021): 110855.
- Zentella, Rodolfo, Ning Sui, Benjamin Barnhill, Wen-Ping Hsieh, Jianhong Hu, Jeffrey Shabanowitz, Michael Boyce et al. "The Arabidopsis O-fucosyltransferase SPINDLY activates nuclear growth repressor DELLA." Nature Chemical Biology 13, no. 5 (2017): 479-485.
- Zentella, Rodolfo, Jianhong Hu, Wen-Ping Hsieh, Peter A. Matsumoto, Andrew Dawdy, Benjamin Barnhill, Harriëtte Oldenhof et al. "O-GlcNAcylation of master growth repressor DELLA by SECRET AGENT modulates multiple signaling pathways in Arabidopsis." Genes & development 30, no. 2 (2016): 164-176.
