Frontier Technologies for Crop Improvement

Dr. Manish K Pandey completed his PhD in Plant Genetics from Osmania University while working in ICAR-Indian Institute of Rice Research (IIRR), Hyderabad, India. He also had Post-doctoral research experience at University of Georgia, USA for a period of two years. He is currently leading the Groundnut and Pigeonpea Genomics, Prebreeding and Bioinformatics research at International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Hyderabad, India.

Dr. Alison Bentley completed her undergraduate and post-graduate degrees at The University of Sydney, Australia. She worked at NIAB, Cambridge for 12 years, working on translational wheat research aiming to move fundamental scientific breakthroughs into tangible impacts for the agri-food sector. She is currently Director of CIMMYT’s Global Wheat Program. Her work combines genetics and genomics to develop and deliver new tools and technology to improve plant breeding.

Dr. Haile Desmae obtained his PhD fromthe University of Queensland (UQ), Brisbane, Australia in 2007. He worked as a postdoctoral and research fellow at UQ for close to six years before joining ICRISAT in 2013. Currently, he is the Groundnut Breeder at CIMMYT based in Senegal. He develops breeding populations for specific traits of importance, plans and implements field trials to identify high yielding groundnut varieties.

Dr Manish Roorkiwal is Genomic Breeding Lead at Khalifa Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology. (KCGEB), United Arab Emirates University, UAE. He is also associated with Institute of Agriculture, University of Western Australia as Adjunct Associate Professor. Manish has over 15 years of research experience. At the core of his work is the improvement of crop productivity of legumes in marginal environments using modern genetics and breeding approaches, including genomic selection.

Prof (Dr.) Rajeev K. Varshney is an agricultural research scientist specializing in genomics and molecular breeding with 20+ years of service in international agriculture while working in India, Germany, Australia, Mexico and several countries in Africa. At present, he is serving Murdoch University (Australia) as a Director, Centre for Crop & Food Innovation; Director, State Agricultural Biotechnology Centre; and International Chair in Agriculture & Food Security with the Food Futures Institute.