Ezra Cornell's vision has special meaning for some people. Kelvin Grant, Ph.D. '07, a plant breeder who works with corn, is one of those deeply moved by the idea of a university "where any person can find instruction in any study."

Although he has been working only a few months, Grant is already giving back to Cornell. He has pledged $5,000 a year for 10 years so that Mann Library can hire minority students to work at its main desk. He worked at Mann for four years as a graduate student and single parent and found it a great place to work.

"At Commencement, when they sang the alma mater, I couldn't stop crying. I was seeing this as a dream that had come true," Grant said.

His long road to achieving this dream began when he was about 12 years old. A major crop failure all over the country devastated most of the hybrid corn varieties. The Grant family corn was regular Tuscarora White and was not touched. It fascinated him that there were different kinds of corn and that the variety made such a big difference.

"I am half Tuscarora Indian, and corn was very significant to my full-blooded grandmother," Grant said. "She introduced me to it as a little kid in rural North Carolina."

Excited about plants and encouraged by his mother, who has a degree in biology, Grant had expected to study botany. But in school he was told that half-black, half-indigenous people don't become plant scientists, or any other kind of scientist.

"That was a burr in my saddle for years," he said.

Grant went on to Howard University with the thought of becoming an attorney, and later volunteered for a project with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Md.

"The volunteer work lit a fire under me to return to botany," he said. "It was a pivotal moment, a coming home to my first interest."

By then divorced and a single parent, Grant enrolled at the University of Maryland to study plant breeding. A professor and mentor, plant molecular geneticist Todd Cook, Cornell Ph.D. '79, sat him down after class one day and, Grant said, "harangued me for 45 minutes about why I was not going on to get a Ph.D."

Grant doubted he would get into any of the 13 schools to which he applied. He was 42, older than most graduate students, and his GPA was not strong. His first choice was Cornell, where he had dreamed of attending most of his life.

But Grant did get into Cornell, and he worked toward his doctorate in plant breeding and genetics for six years. Today, as a research scientist for Pioneer Hi-Bred International in Ithaca, Mich., he is studying abiotic stresses on corn and how the plants respond to less water and nitrogen.

"With each passing year, I am doing less farming. But I am in agriculture, and I am a scientist at the same time. And as Pioneer's one corn breeder for the whole state of Michigan, I can put my mark on what they are doing," Grant said.

This story was adapted from an article by Carole Stone, a senior writer in the Cornell Office of Publications and Marketing. It was originally published in the fall 2007 CALS magazine.