From 1950 and 1985, interest grew nurtured by the enthusiasm of individuals in the Northern Nut Growers Association (Peterson 2003).

The PawPaw Foundation was founded in 1988, by R. Neal Peterson.

In 1990, a full-time pawpaw research program was initiated at Kentucky State University by Brett Callaway (Callaway 1992) and was expanded by Desmond Layne from 1993 to 1997 (Layne 1996) and has been under the direction of Kirk Pomper since 1998 (Pomper et al. 1999).