Mutation Breeding and Efficiency Enhancing Technologies for Resistance to Striga in Cereals - Tapa blanda

Shoba Sivasankar has 30 years of experience leading and managing international agricultural R&D programs. She is currently the Head of Plant Breeding and Genetics at the Joint FAO/IAEA Centre of Nuclear Applications in Food and Agriculture and is based in Vienna, Austria. Prior to this, she was global Director for two CGIAR Research Programs, Dryland Cereals and Grain Legumes, and successfully led the design and merger of the two into a multimillion-dollar mega-programme involving eight international (CGIAR) centres. Before this she coordinated the maize transgenic pipeline for agronomic traits from discovery research to early product development at DuPont Pioneer, now Corteva, at its headquarters in Iowa, USA. In this role, she provided leadership for discovery research in Australia, China, India, Japan and at Wilmington, Delaware, and early product testing in the Americas. This included candidate gene discovery, genetic associations, high-throughput vector construction/plant transformation and high-throughput phenotyping. During her career at DuPont Pioneer, Shoba also managed her own laboratory on stress physiology and digestibility and provided leadership for the establishment of DuPont’s high-throughput phenotyping platform. Shoba is inventor in more than 100 patent applications, has authored several peer-reviewed publications, and edited books and special issues of journals. She did her PhD and post-doc at the University of Guelph, Canada, and MBA degree at the University of Iowa, USA.