Mutation Breeding, Genetic Diversity and Crop Adaptation to Climate Change

Sobhana (Shoba) Sivasankar has 20+ years' experience leading and managing agricultural R&D programs. She is currently the Section Head for Plant Breeding and Genetics at the Joint FAO/IAEA Division of Nuclear Applications in Food and Agriculture at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria. Prior to this role, she was Director for two CGIAR Research Programs, on Dryland Cereals and on Grain Legumes, and successfully led the design and development of the merger of the two in the current GLDC programme. Before this she led the development and coordination of the transgenic pipeline for agronomic traits from discovery research to early product development for DuPont Pioneer, now Corteva, in Iowa, USA. During her career at DuPont Pioneer, she worked in the technical areas of stress physiology and silage digestibility and provided scientific leadership for the development of DuPont's FASTcorn high-throughput phenotyping platform. Born in the southern Indian state of Kerala, Shoba earned her undergraduate and Masters' degrees in agricultural sciences and agronomy from Kerala Agricultural University. She has a PhD in Botany from the University of Guelph, Canada, and MBA from the University of Iowa, USA. She was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the same university in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. Shoba has over 20 issued patents and 109 published patent applications, and several peer-reviewed publications.

Thomas Henry Noel Ellis has more than 30 years of experience in plant molecular genetics. He is currently an honorary academic in the Dept of Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and a visiting scientist at John Innes Center, UK. Before this, he was Director of the CGIAR Research Program on Grain Legumes based in Hyderabad; Professor of Crop Genetics at IBERS Aberystwyth, Scotland; and Associate Head of Crop Genetics at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK. He moved to the John Innes directly after completing his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. The focus of his research in recent years has been on the evolution and diversification of legumes at genomic and phenotype levels.

Ljupcho Jankuloski is currently Technical Officer in Plant Breeding and Genetics at the Joint FAO/IAEA Division of the United Nations. Ljupcho is a plant breeder / geneticist, and prior his IAEA role he was Associate Professor of Plant Genetics and Breeding at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, North Macedonia.

Ivan Ingelbrecht obtained his PhD in Plant Molecular Biology at the University of Ghent, Belgium in 1993. As a PhD student he published one of the first cases of transgene silencing in plants. As a Research Associate at Texas A&M, USA (1996-2000) he produced virus and herbicide resistant transgenic sugarcane plants and developed, together with colleagues, a genetic transformation system for grapefruit. At Texas A&M, he isolated novel proteins involved in RNA interference pathways. In 2000-2001, he worked as a Patent Liaison at CropDesign, Ghent, Belgium. He has 12 years working experience in Sub Saharan Africa, first as a post-doc (1994-1996) and later as Head of the Biotechnology Laboratory at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA-2001 to 2009) in Nigeria. At IITA, Dr Ingelbrecht was PI on research projects to develop genetic transformation systems for the tropical crops cassava and black eye pea and for molecular markers diversity. As Project Coordinator and member of the Research-for-Development Council at IITA, he was also involved in research management and priority setting for the Institute. In 2010, he joined the UN Industrial Development Organization and the Institute Plant Biotechnology Overseas at the University Ghent as Program Manager of the International Industrial Biotechnology Network.