The IWGSC Announces New Appointments to Board of Directors

The Board establishes the overall vision and mission of the Consortium and ensures the implementation of the strategic decisions made by the Coordinating Committee.

Susanne Dreisigacker is Head of the Wheat Genetics and Molecular Breeding Laboratory at CIMMYT in Mexico. Her work focuses on understanding the genetic basis of key traits in wheat breeding and using this information in applying genomics-assisted breeding approaches in wheat improvement. In close collaboration with the CIMMYT wheat breeders, she implements classical molecular breeding approaches such as marker-assisted selection and marker-assisted backcrossing deployed for rapid trait introgression. She’s also involved in the testing and deployment of novel breeding strategies such as recurrent and genomic selection. She has been a member of the IWGSC Coordinating Committee since 2021.

Rajeev Varshney is Director of the Centre for Crop & Food Innovation, Food Futures Institute, at Murdoch University in Australia. He is a globally recognized leader for his work on genome sequencing, cataloguing and utilizing genetic diversity, genomics-assisted breeding, seed system and capacity building in developing countries. He has made centrally important contributions towards improving food and nutrition security in India and several countries in Africa and Asia by assembling genomes, developing genomic resources and integrating genomic technologies in crop improvement programs in many tropical crops, and delivering several superior crop varieties to some of the world’s poorest farmers. His research group at present is working on improving tolerance to drought, heat and frost, and nutrient use efficiency in wheat (in addition to other crops) by developing and deploying novel genomics and pre-breeding approaches such as pangenomics, haplotype cataloguing and functional genomics approaches.